Sona Mohapatra (Photo courtesy: sonamohapatra.com)

Share your thoughts on Sona Mohapatra with SoundCloud

• Sona Mohapatra’s website
• Mohapatra’s latest single Diljale
• The World’s Global Hit
• The Global Hit in iTunes
• Subscribe to the Global Hit

Today’s Geo Quiz is for all of you who take your laundry to a laundry mat. We are looking for a place where you will find the largest outdoor laundry mat in the world. And we are not talking about some facility where washing machines and dryers are lined up in one big room and you must feed the machine. We are talking about wading through rows and rows of open-air concrete basins with water knee-deep to wash those dresses,shirts, sheets and saris. That’s a clue right there.

So which place are we talking about?

The answer to today’s Geo Quiz is Mumbai, India. Mumbai is the home of the Indian Stock Exchange and the country’s movie industry – Bollywood. But despite all the glitz and glamor, in this fast-paced city, many residents still rely on something a bit slower and less high-tech to keep themselves looking good and in clean clothes. Elliot Hannon explains.

Download MP3

By Elliot Hannon
In the heart of India’s financial capital, Mumbai, Ganga Ram wades into a concrete trough filled knee deep with water. He plunges a white dress shirt into the blue-ish grey pool before lifting it over his head and whipping it clean and dry on a concrete slab.

It’s a grueling way to do laundry. But here at the Dhobi Ghats, at what’s considered the world’s largest outdoor laundry mat, Ram and some 10,000 other workers hand wash half a million sheets, shirts and saris every day.

The Dhobi Ghats is a throw back in this city that’s home to India’s stock exchange. The 23-acre plot has more than 700 concrete tubs and was built by the British a century ago. Wedged between a railroad and a busy overpass, hundreds of clotheslines droop with damp clothes.

Dirty laundry is delivered to the Dhobi Ghats from hotels, homes and hospitals every day. Even though more and more people can now afford washing machines of their own, Ganga Ram said the technology doesn’t compare.

“My hand washing gets clothes cleaner than a washing machine,” he said, “because I get all of the dirt that a machine misses.”

But a washing machine is quick and convenient. So to keep pace, Ram’s workday starts at 4 am.

He washes a thousand garments each day. For each shirt he earns 7 rupees, or about 15 cents. Ram picks up and delivers the clothes himself.

To keep things straight he writes the address in the collar or on a tag. Once whites and colors are separated, Ram begins drowning and slapping each shirt. He scrubs stains with a small brush. He puts the clothes through a spin cycle in a small electric dryer and then hangs them out to dry.

Finally, the clothes are pressed with wood irons and packed for delivery. Ram’s day ends at 10 p.m.

For Ram, as with many of the others here, the Dhobi Ghats is a family tradition. Entire families live here and pitch in.

The 50-year-old Ram lives in a small concrete room that is just feet from the tub he rents for $45 a month. His father washed clothes here, just as he has for the past thirty years.

But Ram said his two sons live 400 miles away in Hyderabad, where one is a college professor and the other is studying to be an electrical engineer. So Ram will be the last of his family at the Dhobi Ghats.

We want you to name the state where Mumbai is. This is considered India’s richest state. Some of its wealth comes from Bollywood — the film industry based in Mumbai. It churns out hundreds of films every year — featuring actors, dancers and singers mostly from India. Foreign artist appear on screen sometimes.

But that could be a thing of the past — if a campaign to ban foreign artists from Bollywood is successful. We’ll hear more about that in a minute. Your mission — meanwhile — is to name the state that’s home to Bollywood.

It features pop singer Kylie Minoque singing a raunchy dance tune called Chiggy Wiggy:

“CHIGGY WIGGY”

Harshita Kohli is an entertainment reporter in Mumbai. Listen:

Download MP3

• ‘India’s Muslim community’ series page
• BBC coverage of the Mumbai attacks
• Muslim star Emraan Hashmi (pictured) claims housing bias

Miranda Kennedy’s stories from India were funded by a grant from the International Reporting Project.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston.  India is marking the one-year anniversary of the Mumbai terrorist attacks.  An Islamic militant group based in Pakistan is believed to have planned and executed the attacks.  That’s raised religious tensions in India.  Tomorrow, an interfaith ceremony is planned in Mumbai to memorialize the 166 people killed a year ago.  The ceremony will include Bollywood movie stars.  There are many Muslims working in Bollywood, but India’s film industry rarely depicts the lives of Muslims, as Miranda Kennedy reports from Mumbai.

MIRANDA KENNEDY: A decade ago, director Mahesh Bhatt broke the unspoken and inflexible rules of Bollywood with this film, “Zakhm.”  The movie’s very first scene is of Hindu-Muslim riots on the streets of Mumbai, a no-no in an industry in which successful films ignore ugly reality in favor of romantic plot lines. And the love story here is between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman, which also breaks a taboo.  Bhatt says he made the movie as a way to come to terms with his own experience as the product of a secretive inter-religious relationship.

MAHESH BHATT: Portions of my childhood are there: why my mother was not allowed the status of a wife, how she was a closet Muslim, how she hid her faith and prayed behind closed doors, how she gave us Hindu names and sent us to Christian schools.  According to her instinct, her motherly instinct, that don’t let them tell the world that their mother is a Muslim.

KENNEDY: A generation ago, it was completely unacceptable for a Muslim to marry a Hindu in most sections of society.  It may be a little easier in today’s India, but it’s still not considered okay in the movies. Mahesh Bhatt couldn’t get any big-time backing for his film, and it didn’t do well at the box office. Indu Mirani covers Bollywood for the Mumbai Mirror.

INDU MIRANI: Films here are largely about entertainment. “I’d much rather go and see a song and dance routine.” That’s the way people think here. “Take me into another world, make me happy.”

KENNEDY: Mahesh Bhatt says the big studios steer clear of films that examine religious tensions, because such films can easily lead to protests or riots, shut down movie theatres, and cause millions of dollars of losses.

BHATT: It’s a very important thing to understand this: I can’t make an entire film which talks about the Muslims being discriminated. You can’t make a film on Malcolm X. Not ready yet.

KENNEDY: While many top Bollywood stars are Muslim and keep their names, they still can’t make movies about their own religious identity. And if commercial Bollywood films do feature Muslim characters, they tend to be stereotypes. That’s according to Kabir Khan, a director with one of Bollywood’s biggest studios.

KABIR KHAN: They’re either die hard nationalists and patriotics and will give up life for the country, or they’re these sort of monsters who come in from this terrorist factory, and nothing is in the middle.

KENNEDY: Khan tried to move away from Muslim stereotyping in this film, called “New York,” that he directed earlier this year. It cost around $5 million dollars, which makes it a big release by Bollywood standards, and it’s about an issue usually only addressed in small-budget art films and documentaries.

[Film clip plays]

KENNEDY: The main character is a Muslim. He’s profiled, detained, and tortured in custody, and then eventually turns to terrorism out of a desire for revenge.  Pretty political for Bollywood. But then, it’s not a film about India.  It’s about post-9/11 America.  Film critic Indu Mirani says that neutralizes its impact in India and makes it acceptable for Bollywood.

MIRANI: When you make a film that is about the Muslim identity in America, you’re not really setting yourself up to get into trouble, because that is not something that most of us have faced. But if you talk of Hindu-Muslim riots, that is subject that really very, very few people would touch, because that would be a film that is too close to heart.

KENNEDY: Still, the film “New York” was a lot more political than Bollywood is used to. When it drew big crowds, it was a surprise for everyone, including Khan, its director.

KHAN: I do believe that in the next three, four, five years, we are going to see big budget films which would look at Indian politics. All studios are trying to push boundaries a bit because they realize that the taste of the Indian audience is definitely changing.

KENNEDY: Most Bollywood insiders agree that Indian tastes are shifting ever so slightly away from the age-old formula of boy meets girl, sings her six songs, and marries her at the end. There’s no sign of big budget films about Indian politics on the horizon yet. But Bollywood audiences are already anticipating a second film about Muslims being mistreated in America after 9/11. The next one, called “My Name is Khan,” features Shah Rukh Khan, the biggest superstar of Indian cinema.

ANNOUNCER: Shah Rukh Khan has suffered deep humiliation at the hands of agents at a United States airport.  In fact…

KENNEDY: This isn’t a movie clip.  It’s real-life news coverage of an event which strangely mirrors the upcoming film. Earlier this summer, Shah Rukh Khan was detained for a couple hours at Newark airport as he came into the US. The Indian media responded with outrage. But some suggested the incident might not be so bad. It was free advertising for Shah Rukh Khan’s film, which, in spite of its unsexy subject matter, is expected to be a blockbuster when it comes out early next year.  For the World, this is Miranda Kennedy, Mumbai.

WERMAN: Miranda’s reports from Mumbai were funded by the International Reporting Project. Her three-part series is available at The World dot org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Like many of its neighbors, Afghanistan being one, this place has challenging terrain. More than ninety percent of it is mountainous.

In the east are the Pamirs — home to Communism Peak — at one time the highest point in the Soviet Union. This area was the setting for civil war in the mid-90s when the Moscow-backed government fought an Islamist opposition.

Relations with Moscow are a little calmer now and that’s enabled an unlikely export — in the form of a Youtube superstar. He’s a musician known for singing Bollywood music and he’s now performing in Moscow nightclubs.

We’ll tell you about him and reveal the name of his homeland in our Global Hit…

That would be — Tajikistan. Which leads us nicely into Item 2 – our Global Hit.