Under Grey Smoggy Skies : Living homeless on the streets of India’s Cities – Harsh Mander

Description

Each night, around three million women, men and children sleep rough on harsh city streets across India. People with no home, forced to brave the elements, extremes of climate, ferocious police brutality, and unremitting physical and sexual abuse, every day and night. Life is a desperate and ever-diminishing search for food and any work on any terms, and profound intrusions of privacy and rest. Surviving this chronically violent twilight world of unremitting indignity, want, abuse and crime, is a way of everyday life for them. We—people who live in houses—share the cities with them and yet we know extraordinarily little about their lives, and care even less. Who indeed are these men and women who risk their lives sleeping on pavements and dividers on busy highways? This anthology of essays brings together two decades of the author’s work with urban homeless people. It throws a small beam of light onto the darkest recesses of our cities, piecing together a mosaic of life and death on the streets, how homeless people survive—and sometimes succumb to—an overwhelmingly brutal, sometimes hellish environment.