Barely five minutes into the tour, and we knew that we weren’t their target audience. A clueless (and underage) guide who should have been attending lectures in college at the time, a smartly planned itinerary where issues like child labour and basic hygiene were sidestepped, and a (very) clear intent to woo the fair-skinned Westerner with the sympathy card were all on display.

Years before the Slumdog Millionaire wave had hit the West, slum tourism was making early inroads into Dharavi. So, a few days back, when we read that a tour company that promotes such tourism had won an international award for running a sustainable tourism business, we weren’t surprised entirely. The obsession with a certain India seems to continue, clearly.