Close your eyes, remove yourself from your chair and your cozy little home (or other building). Now place yourself in Kolkata, a city over half the size of Canada situated in eastern India, very close to Bangladesh. No, don’t picture yourself in a hotel, but out in one of the 5000 slums in the city. The air reeks of rot from festering piles of indisposed waste and of human excrement from open sewers. The stench is so overwhelming that you almost feel drowned in it. The heat is unbearable, there hasn’t been rain for days and every movement causes profuse sweating. You turn around in the hoards of people looking desperately for a familiar face but you see no one. You are alone in the slums of Kolkata.
This is a place where unbelievable things happen: *Disillusioned refugees flock to this city whenever plague, war, or disaster strikes them. *They squat on the streets for months before they can find enough money for (and a vacancy in) the slums. *When they move into the slums they crowd into dilapidated huts with 10 people per room. *9 out of 10 families can’t afford half a pound of rice per day. *A separate leper camp prevents the lepers from mingling with society- these people are said to be unclean and condemned by God. *Sick people take drugs to make their blood a healthier red so that nurses will accept it at for-profit blood clinics and pay them with a meal and money. *Researchers hunt down pregnant women and ask them to sell their fetuses for genetic research. The amount paid to such women is so high that many accept- rather than bring another mouth to feed into the world. However, the unqualified people who remove the fetus often end up killing the mother. *It doesn’t really matter to them though. They know they can sell the skeleton to the first world for money. Kolkata is the main city from which India exports its 20 000 human skeletons yearly. Doms (who cremate dead Hindus) are tempted to keep the skeletons for profit. Skeleton sellers will hunt down sick people and have them sell their skeletons in advance, paying them more and more as their health worsens. *Half the children in the slums are underweight.
