The year was 2008. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire had been certified as a blockbuster hit. Dharavi had catapulted onto the world stage as the ‘it’ place to visit, to experience the ‘real Mumbai’, warts and all. Soon, opportunistic local trail planners that leaned towards non-Indian tourists jumped onto the bandwagon, and began to market the slum. We learnt that the booming slum tourism economy, common across Rio de Janeiro’s many favelas (favela: Cluster of settlements inhabited by squatters, and lacking in basic amenities), might have offered inspiration.

The trend caught on like wildfire, and trails to explore Dharavi popped up from all sides with plenty of takers. To get a pulse of this phenomenon, the editor of the newsmagazine I was then working at, suggested I go undercover to gauge the authenticity of these trails. The end result was an eye-opener. The travel group that had organised my walk was spot-on with the target audience of mostly privileged firangs, keen to get a slice of “Daaravee”. Halts included carefully curated sections of the slum.