Slumscape Through the Window: When a Nation’s Aesthetic Dies of Neglect

By Ruchi Chabra
It begins with a whistle.
I sit by the window of the train, clutching a lukewarm cup of over-sweet chai. The platform where I had been waiting was no place of transition — it resembled an open wound, raw and untreated. Cracked tiles, the acrid stench of stale urine, bloated rats darting across the tracks, water puddles from leaking pipes birthing armies of mosquitoes — the scene plays out like a cruel parody of order.
Around me, sun-baked, malnourished men, women, and children — their hair bleached with neglect — sit or sleep on tattered mats beside their luggage. Dressed in garish, synthetic clothes, their poverty shouts long before they do. Their laughter isn’t carefree; it is sharp, cautious, a survival strategy. Even among the impoverished, there is hierarchy — and these families, for all their hardship, still look down upon the beggars who hover around them like moths to a dim light.
These beggars are a gallery of despair — unkempt, unwashed, shivering in rags. A man missing limbs from leprosy. A blind youth tapping his way through indifferent crowds. Mothers with nursing infants pressed against their chests, whispering for milk. Old, bent Amma-jis and Baba-jis with hands outstretched, waiting for someone to remember their humanity. Each pleads not just for alms, but for dignity.
And then there are those waiting on benches — relatively better off, fed, well-groomed, vigilant. They hold on tightly to their mobile phones, handbags, and illusions of safety, casting wary glances at anyone who might disrupt their fragile bubble of privilege.
Indian railway platforms are theatres of exhaustion. The people squatting there mirror the platforms themselves: overcrowded, broken, ignored. More people than benches. More garbage than bins. Overflowing dustbins, torn plastic bags, and the glazed stares of those who no longer hope to move on.
Barefoot children dart near the tracks, dancing on the edge of death, chasing dreams inside crushed Pepsi cans and shattered mobile covers. Their laughter stings. Their eyes have witnessed far too much. Even the air speaks — thick with the smells of decay and desperation.
There is no landscape here. That is reserved for our airports.
Perhaps it is assumed that only the poor, the struggling, the forgotten travel by train — so why bother with beauty? What’s the need for art, for greenery, for dignity in design? Their senses, already assaulted by stench, noise, and heat, are apparently not in need of aesthetic nourishment. A broken canvas is deemed good enough. What they pay, they get.
And then, we move.
As the train gathers speed and cuts through the fringes of the city, what greets the eye is no better. It’s not a landscape — it’s a slumscape.
Mounds of garbage line the tracks like silent sentinels of indifference. Open drains fester. People squat in the open, their backs turned in silent shame. Slums stretch like festering wounds — stitched together by tarpaulin, bamboo poles, and desperation. Smoke curls up from makeshift stoves. So do the cries of hungry infants.
And I — the traveller, the observer — feel complicit in my silence.
Where is the beauty we once spoke of?
India — the land of rivers and sages, of miniature paintings and mountain poems — what do we show our passengers today? Our neglect. Not our care. Not our grace.
Where are the gardens? The murals? The tender touches of a nation proud of its cultural inheritance? What should be a corridor of care has become a corridor of corrosion. What should be framed like a painting resembles instead a crime scene of civic apathy.
It isn’t just filth we travel through — it’s heartbreak.
What India needs is not another Swachh Bharat slogan or an Instagram filter slapped over poverty. It needs love — fierce, intentional, daily love. Love that feeds empty stomachs. That ensures jobs. That educates. That creates the conditions for dreams to be born.
We need a revival of civic aesthetics — tree-lined walkways, landscaped platforms, public art, proper waste disposal. But more than that, we need guardianship, not just governance. The kind of civic love that says, “You matter,” to every child picking scraps near a track.
As my train rushes past another fly-infested dump and I watch an old woman foraging through it for food, a question burns in me:
Why have we become so numb? Why are we letting the rot seep into our imagination too?
But then, from the cracks, ideas bloom — like wildflowers in a wasteland.
India’s sorrow is also its strength — a nation brimming with young people, smartphones in hand, but no tools in sight. What if we changed that? What if we gave them not sermons, but systems?
Imagine sleek, AI-powered machines operated by local youth — mega vacuum cleaners on wheels that suck up soot, sort waste in real time, convert biodegradable matter into compost on-site. The technology exists. Why not the will?
While industries are subject to recycling mandates under existing laws, why does enforcement often seem inconsistent?

Why can’t our platforms and slums become spaces of innovation — vertical gardens, composting stations, eco-corridors of art and function?
What we need is not another scheme.We need vision.
A coalition of thinkers, doers, and believers — policy-makers, designers, engineers, environmentalists, and social entrepreneurs — who see beauty as a right, not a luxury. Who see waste as opportunity. Who see the poor not as a problem, but as partners.
It is possible.
This slumscape can be rewritten — one machine, one job, one mural at a time. But it requires more hearts that care, more hands that build, more minds that imagine not just what is — but what could be.
Let this journey not end with a sigh at the window.
Let it begin with a footstep on the platform.

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