Harry Styles Mocks Candace Owens’ ‘Bring Back Manly Men’ ‘Vogue’ Comments, Talks Challenging Traditional Gender Boundaries Through Fashion

Harry Styles discusses his love of fashion, quarantine, Black Lives Matter, and more in a new interview with Variety

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© Credit: Parker Woods/Variety

Styles, who is the publication's 2020 Hitmaker of the Year, says of challenging traditional gender boundaries through fashion: “To not wear [something] because it’s females’ clothing, you shut off a whole world of great clothes. And I think what’s exciting about right now is you can wear what you like. It doesn’t have to be X or Y. Those lines are becoming more and more blurred.”

The musician recently hit headlines after right-wing commentator Candace Owens slammed him for wearing a dress and feminine garments for his Vogue cover shoot.

Styles appeared to mock Owens' "bring back manly men" remarks as he shared a snap from the Variety shoot of himself eating a banana alongside that same caption.

Candace Owens

@RealCandaceO

There is no society that can survive without strong men. The East knows this. In the west, the steady feminization of our men at the same time that Marxism is being taught to our children is not a coincidence. It is an outright attack. Bring back manly men.

Vogue Magazine

@voguemagazine

"There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.": Read our full December cover story starring @Harry_Styles here: http://vogue.cm/Pdns6GQ

12:16 PM · Nov 14, 2020

RELATED: Harry Styles Talks Black Lives Matter And Removing Barriers & Labels In ‘Vogue’ Interview

Styles talks about his self-reflection during COVID quarantine, telling the mag: “It’s been a pause that I don’t know if I would have otherwise taken. I think it’s been pretty good for me to have a kind of stop, to look and think about what it actually means to be an artist, what it means to do what we do and why we do it. I lean into moments like this — moments of uncertainty.”

He then discusses his decision to speak out publicly following the killing of George Floyd: “Talking about race can be really uncomfortable for everyone. I had a realization that my own comfort in the conversation has nothing to do with the problem — like, that’s not enough of a reason to not have a conversation.

"Looking back, I don’t think I’ve been outspoken enough in the past. Using that feeling has pushed me forward to being open and ready to learn. How can I ensure from my side that in 20 years, the right things are still being done and the right people are getting the right opportunities? That it’s not a passing thing?”

Styles recently nabbed a string of 2021 Grammy nominations for his 2019 album Fine Line, telling Variety: “It’s always nice to know that people like what you’re doing, but ultimately — and especially working in a subjective field — I don’t put too much weight on that stuff. I think it’s important when making any kind of art to remove the ego from it.”

Citing the painter Matisse, he adds: “It’s about the work that you do when you’re not expecting any applause.”

In race to cement legacy, Trump pushes dozens of 'midnight regulations'

As President Donald Trump keeps a lower profile during his final weeks in office, behind the scenes the administration is racing to solidify his legacy, fulfill campaign promises and overhaul federal regulations that could take President-elect Joe Biden years to undo.

© Evan Vucci/AP President Donald Trump signs an executive order on protecting Florida coastline from offshore drilling after delivering remarks on the environment at Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse and Museum, Sept. 8, 2020, in Jupiter, Fla.

"I think that there will be a lot of things happening between now and the 20th of January, a lot of things," Trump asserted in an Oval Office appearance on Thanksgiving.

From immigration to environmental protections, the Trump administration is quietly pushing to finalize more than three dozen rule changes that could have significant impact for years.

"We call them 'midnight regulations.' It's the last chance to put these rules on the books before the Trump administration changes to the Biden administration," said ProPublica investigative reporter Isaac Arnsdorf who has created an online database tracking the pending regulations for the nonprofit news site. "They can be reversed, but not easily."MORE: Tracking the Trump Administration's "Midnight Regulations"

They include religious exemptions for federal contractors under employment discrimination laws; looser water efficiency standards for shower heads and washing machines; and stricter eligibility for food stamps, even as millions out of work in the pandemic look to the government for help

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© Jenny Kane/AP Water flows from a shower head, Aug. 12, 2020, in Portland, Ore. The Trump Administration wants to change the definition of a showerhead to let more water flow.

"The final days of an administration are obviously hugely important, and it's just natural to want to get things done," said Carol Browner, former EPA administrator during all eight years of the Clinton administration and also a former member of President Barack Obama's transition team and first climate czar.

"But you're not free to just do it willy nilly. There's the law, there's the science, there's the process," Browner said.

Experts said the raw number of 11th-hour regulatory changes appears, so far, to be on par with what occurred during the final weeks of the Obama administration. But some policy advocates and independent watchdogs worry the rushed process will compromise legality and public safety.

Many of the most significant last-minute regulations are focused on environmental and scientific policy, including a controversial effort to ban EPA use of any scientific study that doesn't fully disclose all of the underlying raw data. Its defenders call it a step toward transparency, while critics call it censorship.

Studies on the impact of pollution on human life, for example, often rely on sensitive personal medical data, which patients don't want publicly disclosed.

© Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images President-elect Barack Obama listens while Carol Browner speaks at a press conference in Chicago, Dec. 15, 2008.

"You will simply not get the quality of science that EPA needs to make decisions, and this is a very, very intentional move on their part, on behalf of polluters, which is to limit the science and therefore limit the ability of EPA to make the smartest decision," said Browner.MORE: Greenland's largest glaciers could lose more ice than previously predicted if emissions continue as 'business as usual'

The Trump administration is also racing to auction off drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- a move strongly opposed by Biden -- with an aim of making it much more difficult for the next administration to turn back from expanded oil and gas development.

"The degree to which the leases have been entered into you might have to buy them back," said Browner. "But hopefully the reality is we can continue to protect these areas that have been protected for hundreds of years now.

The president is also attempting to further cement his crackdown on immigration. In his final weeks, he's added eight new questions to the citizenship test and tried to make it harder for high-skilled foreign workers to get visas.

"In this last-minute rush before the inauguration the Trump administration is doing everything they can to bring legal immigration closer and closer to the bare minimum," said Ali Noorani, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, a nonpartisan advocacy group. "It is ramping up enforcement actions, and really trying to do everything they can to finish checking those boxes and make it as hard as possible for the Biden administration to rebuild the nation's immigration system."

© Carlos Osorio/AP

 A citizenship test kiosk is displayed at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich., March 9, 2012.

On foreign policy, Trump is abruptly and sharply reducing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no more than 2,500 American service members expected in each country by the end of the year. While the pullout was a key 2016 campaign promise, experts said the late move puts Biden in the difficult spot of needing to decide whether to redeploy troops back into theater early in his first term.

Outgoing former President George W. Bush, in a similar situation, notably deferred to his successor, Obama, in late 2008 on whether to approve a troop surge in Afghanistan

Trump has also taken steps to formally shut the door on a two-decade-old treaty he has long criticized, pulling out of the "Open Skies Treaty" last month which had allowed U.S. and Russia to conduct mutual surveillance flights to build trust. Critics say the move is a gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Russia didn't adhere to the treaty, so until they adhere, we will pull out," Trump said in May.

"The problem is if we don't abide by our own treaties, if we don't recognize and support our own treaties, then who in the international community is going to want to partner with us in the future?" said retired Adm. Bill McCraven, who oversaw the raid to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Some of Trump's final executive actions will have permanent impact.

The Justice Department is rushing to execute as many federal death row inmates as possible before Biden has a chance to reimpose a death penalty moratorium.

© Michael Conroy/AP, FILE 

The federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Ind., Aug. 28, 2020.

Eight federal inmates have been executed so far this year -- the most in more than a century -- with five more slated for death before Inauguration Day next month.

"The pace of these federal executions has no historical precedent," said Robert Dunham, executive director of the independent, nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center. "The last time more than one person was executed during a transition period takes us back to Grover Cleveland's first presidency in the end of the 1880s."

The Trump administration, in a late-term rule change, is also giving executioners greater flexibility in how they kill.

"The regulation will allow them, without challenge, to use whatever method of lethal injection that it wants to use," Dunham said.

Meanwhile, Trump continues with a record number of lifetime appointments to federal courts, breaking with 123 years of precedent by pursuing Senate confirmation of even more judges after losing reelection.

"Generally once an election occurs, confirmations stop until the next Congress," said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, an independent judicial watchdog. "It's hard to know the impact right now exactly that these Trump-appointed judges will have, but we know it's going to be big, it's going to be huge, it's going to be generational."

© Jonathan Ernst/Reuters 

Judge Amy Coney Barrett is sworn in to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as her husband Jesse Barrett and President Donald Trump watch on the South Lawn of the White House, Oct. 26, 2020.

Some of Trump's final acts face challenges in court, and if Democrats win control of the Senate, there could be fast-track repeals of recently finalized regulations. But experts say most of the policy changes won't be easily undone.

"You have to go through the whole rule-making process all over again, which takes multiple years and a lot of resources and is cumbersome by design," said Arnsdorf.

The process is a reminder that the power of the presidency can make a lasting impact on America up to the very last minute of a White House transition.

Egyptian model arrested over photo shoot at ancient pyramid

Cairo — Egyptian model Salma El-Shimy was arrested on Monday over a photo session in Saqqara, a prominent archaeological site in the city of Giza. El-Shimy, 26, posed for a collection of photos in a dress modeled on ancient Egyptian clothing. The outfit was deemed "inappropriate" by officials at the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. © Salma El-Shimy/Facebook and ‌‌🇭‌🇴‌🇸‌🇸‌🇦‌🇲 ‌🇲‌🇺‌🇭‌🇦‌🇲‌🇪‌🇪‌🇩 salma-el-shimy-egypt.jpg

The Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziri, referred the incident to public prosecutors for investigation, the ministry confirmed in a statement. It quoted Waziri as warning that, "anyone who shows negligence when it comes to antiquities or our unique Egyptian civilization will be punished."

© Provided by CBS News

 Model Salma El-Shimy poses at the archaeological site of Saqqara, in Giza, Egypt, during a shoot with photographer Hossam Muhameed. Both were arrested and have been charged with photography without a permit for the shoot, which sparked a huge backlash in Egypt.

 / Credit: Salma El-Shimy/Facebook/Hossam Muhameed

Two of the ministry's employees and four security personnel who work at the location were also referred to prosecutors for administrative investigation, Sabry Farag, director of the Saqqara antiquities site, told CBS News. Farag denied reports that those six individuals were also arrested.

Anyone who wants to carry out a photo or video shoot for commercial purposes at one of Egypt's archaeological sites must obtain a permit from the ministry.

El-Shimy's photographer, 22-year-old Hossam Muhammed, told a local newspaper that he and his subject reached an "agreement" with staff at the site to shoot photos around the Pyramid of Djoser for about 15 minutes. The pyramid dates to the 27th century BC.

Muhammed was also arrested later Monday evening.

El-Shimy referred to herself as Queen "Malban-titi" for the photo shoot, a name combing references to the sweet treat Turkish delight, "Malban," and ancient Egypt's Queen Nefertiti.

The photos went viral and revived a heated debate about the difference between breaking social norms and breaking the law.

One lawyer filed suit, accusing El-Shimy of "the distortion of civilization and insulting the great Pharaonic history." A member of Egypt's parliament called for El-Shimy to face the "severest punishments."

Under Egypt's justice system any individual can file a lawsuit against anyone for any reason, but it's up to the public prosecutor to decide whether there's a valid case and then bring formal charges.

Hyperbole aside, the public prosecutor ordered the release of both El-Shimy and her photographer on Tuesday evening on bail of 500LE each (about $32), pending a full investigation. They are facing formal charges of photography without a permit, according to local news outlets, but no charges related to indecency or anything else stemming from the claims of impropriety.

Mohamed told local press he was surprised by the huge reaction, insisted he did nothing wrong and was just trying to earn a living. He said he was paid 1000LE (about $65) for the shoot, and if he had known it would turn into such a scandal, he would have declined the job.

He also said he believed that if the model involved had a different body type, none of this would have happened.

Despite the outrage from some corners, other Egyptians rallied to defend El-Shimy's right to wear whatever she wants and criticized the tourism ministry's actions, suggesting the prosecution would only bring bad publicity for Egypt.

Just two weeks ago Saqqara was in the news for the landmark archaeological discovery of about 100 sealed coffins containing mummified bodies.

Born in Vancouver in 1916, Fred Ko becomes one of the pandemic's oldest victims

Eva Uguen-Csenge CBC

© Submitted Fred Ko died in Richmond Hospital of COVID-19 on Nov. 28, 2020. 

He was born in Vancouver in 1916.

Born in a church manse on Vancouver's Beatty Street on March 28, 1916, Fred Ko's long life was defined by quiet fortitude and his connections to the people and places around him.

Ko died in Richmond Hospital on Saturday from COVID-19. At 104 years old, he is one of the oldest Canadian victims of the pandemic.

"He was just a super-optimistic, very gentle soul," said his daughter Alison Ko, who lives in Kimberley, B.C. "Everybody calls him the Buddha."

Fred Ko had two daughters, a son and two grandsons, but Alison says he was a grandfather to many more.

"He's the grandpa to all [my sons'] friends and all my friends."

She recalls a time her father's generosity and patience stood out when Alison and her sister, Catherine, returned home late from a party.

"He would be sitting up in the kitchen reading and we'd walk in the door and he would just go, 'Tsk tsk tsk,' and not say a word, close his magazine and walk up the stairs." 

© Submitted by Kalum Ko Fred Ko as photographed by his grandson. Ko died in a Richmond, B.C., hospital on Nov. 28, 2020 after contracting COVID-19. At 104 years old, he is one of the oldest Canadians to die of the disease.

Advocate for Chinese Canadians

Fred Ko was the third child born to Chinese Canadian parents in Vancouver. The family started out with a printing press that produced the first Chinese telephone book, and later opened gift shops in Toronto and Vancouver.

While her father was humble, Alison Ko says he sometimes gave hints of the influence he had on the Chinese community.

Her cousins told stories of hanging out at his store and seeing members of parliament stop by to see Fred.

Once, at a family gathering, he let slip that he had negotiated with former prime minister John Diefenbaker over immigration rights.

"But he just looked like the guy who sat at a coffee shop," Alison Ko said.

She says her father never spoke about experiencing racism until the recent Black Lives Matter protests.

"He was like, 'Oh, yeah, we went through hard times, too,' but growing up we had no idea about the challenges that they would have had because of racism."
'It was so fast'

The pandemic was hard on Fred Ko. His daughter says his usual routine of getting up early to go for walks around the malls ended and he lost much of his physical strength.

"And then he lost a lot of kind of that spark," said Alison Ko. "He would tell me that, 'I hear the words and I know them, but I don't understand them.'"

Ko had been living in Richmond with Catherine for the last 10 years before contracting the virus last month from someone who lived in the same building.

Alison Ko says her father's passing still feels surreal, despite his age.

"It's not really a surprise that at 104 life was going to come to an end, but we just didn't think he would," she said. "And all our relatives and our families just thought Fred will get through this. But it was so fast."

Once Ko was hospitalized, his three children and two grandchildren were only able to communicate with him by video calls.

That's how they said goodbye as he died on Nov. 28.

"We sat staring at a screen, watching him take his last breath and I didn't even believe it."

Fred Ko's death has made his family reflect even more on their own vulnerabilities to the virus. Alison, who has a background in nursing and works on the opioid crisis, says it hit her when she was called to the front line to respond to an overdose earlier this week.

Despite the toll the pandemic restrictions took on him, she says her father never complained.

"He was of the generation that knew that he needed to put everybody else like the community's needs first."

Barack Obama Says DNC Should Give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a Bigger Platform as Feud Between Progressives and Centrists Grows

  

© Drew Angerer/Getty 

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks outside of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on November 19, 2020 in Washington, DC. 

Former President Barack Obama called on the Democratic National Committee to give a bigger platform to progressives as they continue to butt heads with the party's centrist members.

"One thing I will say about the Democratic Party is that promoting young people is really important. We stick so long with the same old folks and don't make room for new voices," Obama said in an interview with Peter Hamby on Snapchat's Good Luck America.

Obama also acknowledge the party's controversial decision to allot Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only 60 seconds at this summer's national convention, while handing out significantly more television time to former Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich and businessman and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

"The Democratic National Convention, I thought, was really successful considering the pandemic but, you know, the fact that an AOC only got, what? Three minutes or five minutes? When she speaks to a broad section of young people who are interested in what she has to say, even if they don't agree with everything she says," Obama said.

"You give her a platform, just like there may be some other young Democrats who come from more conservative areas who have a different point of view. But new blood is always good," he continued.

His comments come as conflict between the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and more centrists Democrats have widened following the November 3 election.

Last month, establishment Democrats were heard on a leaked caucus call blaming more progressive lawmakers, particularly Ocasio-Cortez and the so-called Squad, for costing Democrats seats with messaging like defund the police.

Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat, drew criticisms from the young congresswoman and others after tweeting, "Defund the police? Defund my butt."

In an interview with The New York Times, Manchin suggested Ocasio-Cortez is "more active on Twitter than anything else," including legislating in Congress.

"We're not going to defund the police, we're not for the new green deal. That's not going to happen. We're not for Medicare for All—we can't even pay for Medicare for some," the senator added.

However, many were quick to note that Manchin missed more votes than Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 and that she co-sponsored 130 more bills than he did in the same legislative period.

Ocasio-Cortez fired back at Manchin on Tuesday, tweeting, "I find it amusing when politicians try to diminish the seriousness of our policy work, movement organizing & grassroots fundraising to 'she just tweets,' as though 'serious' politics is only done by begging corporate CEOs for money through wax-sealed envelopes delivered by raven." 

A H/T TO BALTIMORE AND IT'S POET SON

Watch: AOC Backs Sanders In Short But Powerful DNC 2020 Speech

Despite Obama's push for newer voices within the party, the former president advised younger Democrats to steer clear of such "snappy slogans" which can cost them "a big audience the minute you say it."

"If you instead say, 'Let's reform the police department so that everybody's being treated fairly, you know, divert young people from getting into crime, and if there was a homeless guy, can maybe we send a mental health worker there instead of an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy?' Suddenly, a whole bunch of folks who might not otherwise listen to you are listening to you," Obama said.

"The key is deciding: Do you actually want to get something done? Or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?" he added.

Newsweek reached out to the offices of Manchin and Ocasio-Cortez for comment but did not hear back from either in time for publication.

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BIG FRIGGEN DEAL

'Big Sky' producers recognize Native American criticism

DAVID E KELLEY 

PRETENDS TO BE IGNORENT

PROVING HE IS 

© Provided by The Canadian Press

LOS ANGELES — Native American tribes and advocates are condemning “Big Sky,” a Montana-set ABC drama, for ignoring the history of violence inflicted on Indigenous women and instead making whites the crime victims.

They also have assailed the network and the show's producers for failing to respond to their complaints, which they first made known in a Nov. 17 letter. On Tuesday, the makers of “Big Sky” broke their silence.

“After meaningful conversations with representatives of the Indigenous community, our eyes have been opened to the outsized number of Native American and Indigenous women who go missing and are murdered each year, a sad and shocking fact," the executive producers said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“We are grateful for this education and are working with Indigenous groups to help bring attention to this important issue,” according to the statement. 

The producers include David E. Kelley ("Big Little Lies," “The Undoing”) and novelist C.J. Box, whose 2013 book “The Highway” was adapted for the series.

Created by Kelley, “Big Sky” stars Katheryn Winnick and Kylie Bunbury as private detectives searching for two white sisters on a road trip who go missing and turn out to be part of a pattern of abductions.

With a disproportionate number of American Indians among Montana’s missing and murdered girls and women, the fictional approach represents “at best, cultural insensitivity, and at worst, appropriation,” said the signers, including the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council that represents all of Montana’s tribal nations.

“I’m not at all surprised that they’re doing this because Hollywood’s been appropriating our trauma and our lived experience for years and years and years,” said Georgina Lightning, an actor and longtime activist. “And we’ve always cried about it. We’ve always called it out. But nobody ever cared. Nobody ever listened and nobody cared.”

In the November letter, ABC was asked to consider adding an on-screen message steering viewers to information about the entrenched peril facing Indigenous women in North America. They cited “Somebody's Daughter,” a documentary detailing the murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls crisis, as it's known to those fighting the scourge.

“This is such an easy fix for ABC to make,” the film's director, Rain, said in a statement. “Indigenous leaders are reaching out to ally and inform, to open a dialogue. They’re not asking for ‘Big Sky’ to be taken off the air,” he said, but instead be used to inform.

When no response was forthcoming, the coalition took its effort public and enlisted support from other tribal organizations, including Canada’s Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs and the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen's Association.

“Two-thirds of this country doesn’t even know that Native Americans still exist," said Tom Rodgers, president of the Global Indigenous Council and a co-signer of the letter to ABC. “We thought, what a teachable moment.”

In response to the producers' statement, a skeptical Rodgers said Tuesday he hadn't heard from anyone connected with the show and called for further details, including which Indigenous partners were being consulted.

While more than 5,000 Indigenous women were reported missing in 2016 in the U.S., reporting by The Associated Press has shown the number is difficult to determine because some cases go unreported, others aren’t well-documented, and a comprehensive government database to track the cases is lacking.

Advocates, including some lawmakers representing Native Americans, also link the long-standing problem to inadequate resources, indifference and a jurisdictional maze. The rise of the #MeToo movement helped give the issue political heft, but Hollywood has lagged in paying heed.

While Lightning said she was “a little bit shocked” when she saw a Native American tragedy mirrored in a story but without Native American characters, her years working in Los Angeles meant she wasn’t surprised. Now living in Alberta, she’s in the Canadian miniseries “Trickster,” about a dysfunctional Native family.

“There's such resistance” to change in Hollywood, she said. "When you’re used to being one of the good old boys... there's no way they think they’re going to have to conform to the rest of society. It’s such an arrogance.”

Native Americans are used to being routinely ignored by American popular culture, registering barely a blip on TV as they're usually seen on only one or two shows, such as Paramount Network's “Yellowstone.” A University of California, Los Angeles, study released this year found that Indigenous actors were cast in six of 1,816 broadcast and cable series roles for the 2018-19 season.

But being slighted on the crucial issue raised by “Big Sky” is too bitter a pill to accept, said Rodgers, a Blackfeet Nation member whose Global Indigenous Council, an advocacy group for Indigenous peoples worldwide, helped organize the outreach to ABC.

“The one thing we won’t be anymore is ignored. We’re not going to be made invisible, we will not be erased," he said.

____

Lynn Elber can be reached at lelber@ap.org and is on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lynnelber.

___

This story has been corrected to use the accurate pronoun for filmmaker Rain.

Lynn Elber, The Associated Press

HOW THE WORLD’S BIGGEST SLUM STOPPED THE VIRUS

Dharavi contained Covid-19 against all the odds.

 Now its people need to survive an economic catastrophe.

By Ari Altstedter and Dhwani Pandya
Photographs and Video by Zishaan A Latif

Normally, Khwaja Qureshi’s recycling facility in Dharavi, the slum in Mumbai, would be no place for three newborn tabby kittens. Before efforts to contain the novel coronavirus idled much of the Indian economy, the 350-square-foot concrete room was a hive of nonstop industry. Five workers were there 12 hours a day, seven days a week, dumping crushed water bottles, broken television casings, and discarded lunchboxes into a roaring iron shredder, then loading the resulting mix of plastic into jute sacks for sale to manufacturers. But during a recent visit, the shredder was silent and the workers gone, decamped to their villages in India’s north. That left the kittens plenty of space to gambol across the bare floor, nap on a comfortable cardboard box, or be amused by the neighborhood kids who came to visit.

Qureshi, a stout, thick-fingered man of 43 whose father founded the operation, mostly ignored his feline workplace companions. He’d been spending his days sitting on a plastic chair, drinking cup after cup of milk tea and chatting with other Dharavi entrepreneurs, all of them part of Mumbai’s fearsomely efficient but completely informal recycling industry, who stopped by to talk business. The consensus was pessimistic. India’s economy is in an historic slump, and less economic activity means fewer things being thrown away—and also less demand to make new products from the old. No one had much hope that things would pick up soon.


▲ Khwaja Qureshi is waiting for his employees to return.


The irony is that Dharavi, which has a population of about 1 million and is probably the most densely packed human settlement on Earth, has largely contained the coronavirus. Thanks to an aggressive response by local officials and the active participation of residents, the slum has gone from what looked like an out-of-control outbreak in April and May to a late-September average of 1.3 cases per day for every 100,000 residents, compared with about 7 per 100,000 in Portugal. That success has made Dharavi an unlikely role model, its methods copied by epidemiologists elsewhere and singled out for praise by the World Health Organization. It’s also a remarkable contrast to the disaster unfolding in the rest of India. The country has recorded more than 6.5 million confirmed cases—putting it on track to soon overtake the U.S.—and over 103,000 deaths.

Dharavi’s economic calamity, however, may be just getting started. Its maze of tarpaulin tents and illegally built tenements and workshops have traditionally served as a commercial engine for all of Mumbai, a frenetic crossroads of exchange and entrepreneurship at the heart of India’s financial capital. Before the pandemic, it generated more than $1 billion a year in activity, providing a base for industries from pottery and leather-tanning to recycling and the garment trade. Deprivation abounded, but Dharavi could also be a social accelerator, allowing the poorest to begin their long climb to greater prosperity—and to joining the consumer class that powers the $3 trillion Indian economy. Qureshi’s own family is a case in point. His father was born in the hinterland to a poor tenant farmer but moved to Dharavi to work in a textile factory, getting into the recycling business after he realized the value of the plastic packaging that new spools of thread arrived in.


▲ Kiran Dighavkar at an isolation center.

Led by an energetic municipal manager named Kiran Dighavkar, who was also in charge of the slum’s Covid-19 response, people in Dharavi are now trying to restart their economic lives without seeding new outbreaks. Their success or failure will be an important example for similar places around the world—areas that are home to as much as a sixth of the global population and which no government hoping for a durable recovery from the virus can afford to ignore. Whether in Nairobi’s Kibera or Rio de Janeiro’s hilltop favelas, slum economies are inextricably linked to the cities around them. In some countries their inhabitants account for 90% of the informal urban workforce—an army of construction laborers, small-time vendors, assembly-line helpers, and restaurant servers that developing world metropolises rely on to function. Those jobs are never easy, but they are often preferable to the monotony of rural poverty.

The challenge in Dharavi is to reclaim this vitality safely. “Now we have to live with this disease,” Dighavkar said in an interview at a temporary hospital, one of several he’d established to handle Covid-19 cases. “Dharavi is a hub of activity, and we cannot let it go.”

Watch: How India’s Biggest Slum Contained Covid

Dharavi’s modern history dates to the late 19th century, when Muslim tanners, looking for a place to practice their odoriferous trade outside the limits of British-run Bombay, built a rudimentary settlement nearby. By the 1930s it was attracting other migrants: potters from Gujarat, crafters of gold and silver embroidery from north India, and leather workers from the Tamil-speaking south, among many others. All added their own living quarters, building with whatever materials they could find, giving little notice to the fact they were, technically, squatting on government-owned land.

As the Raj gave way to independent India and Mumbai’s population swelled, the teeming slum eventually found itself not on the city’s fringe but near its geographic center. By then, many of its tents and huts had been replaced by structures of brick, concrete, and tile, arrayed around communal wells and powered by electricity from the municipal grid—even though almost no residents had formal land title. There were far too many of them to evict, or ignore, and in the 1970s, vote-seeking politicians began to make small improvements, such as public latrines. By the time the area played a starring role in 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, soaring housing costs in the rest of Mumbai had even made it attractive to some white-collar workers looking for affordable, centrally located housing.

Meanwhile, Mumbai’s government had begun floating ideas for a redevelopment, one that would replace lopsided squatters’ homes with modern apartments and move factories and workshops into purpose-built quarters, probably elsewhere in the metropolis. But successive consultations, proposals, tenders, and visioning exercises failed to settle on any plan. That was due in part to opposition from residents, who pointed out that even if renovations brought better housing, their jobs might be relocated to distant industrial parks.


▲ International Footsteps’ workshop.

Dighavkar, who is 37 and a civil engineer by training, came to Dharavi with modest ambitions. Last year he was named assistant municipal commissioner for G Ward North, a swath of Mumbai that includes the slum. His previous posting was in the historic core, where his signature project had been the construction of a viewing platform in front of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, an architecturally spectacular Victorian rail hub, that allowed tourists to snap photos without dashing into traffic. He also proudly took credit for building the city’s costliest public convenience, a $122,000 toilet complex on a busy seaside promenade.


▲ Dr. Asad Khan (center) and Dighavkar at a field hospital.

With redevelopment plans in flux, Dighavkar’s superiors had little enthusiasm for putting significant money into Dharavi. So in his first months in his new role he focused on the middle-class neighborhoods at its edges, laying new sidewalks and making symbolic changes such as switching the figures on crosswalk signals from male to female.

Dharavi’s first coronavirus case was posthumous. In early April, a 56-year-old resident tested positive after he’d already died. There were only about 2,000 confirmed infections in India at the time, mostly traceable to international travel, and the news seemed to indicate a serious problem. A place with more people than San Francisco, crammed into an area smaller than Central Park, is hardly a promising environment for social distancing. As many as 80 people may share a single public toilet in Dharavi, and it’s not uncommon for a family of eight to occupy a 100-square-foot home. Infections were soon spreading rapidly, prompting the Mumbai government to impose draconian containment measures. Whole streets were sealed off behind checkpoints, with officers on patrol and camera-equipped drones buzzing overhead. With rare exceptions, no one could leave the area, not that there was anywhere to go: The rest of the city, and all of India, were locked down, too, though usually with much lighter enforcement.

▲ Near Qureshi’s recycling facility.

But to Dighavkar, the impossibility of keeping slum residents in their homes quickly became evident. At the very least, people had to come out to use the toilet, to fill water bottles from public taps, and to collect food packets donated by charities. Gradually he and his colleagues developed a more precise approach. Rather than waiting for infected people to announce themselves, the government began dispatching teams of health-care workers to find them, going door to door asking about symptoms, offering free fever screenings, and administering tests to those likeliest to have the virus. They commandeered wedding halls, sports centers, and schools as isolation facilities to separate suspected cases from the rest of the population. Those who tested positive were sent to hospital wards that had been dedicated entirely to treating Covid-19, while contact tracers raced to locate people they’d spent time with.

Some were reluctant to cooperate. Many people in Dharavi work in unlicensed businesses that are in perpetual danger of being closed, and have good reasons to avoid contact with the authorities. But Dighavkar’s workers gradually won their trust, thanks in part to residents returning from quarantine telling of a comfortable stay and competent care. By July the number of new cases had declined to an average of 10 a day, compared with 45 per day in May, although the figure has since ticked modestly upward.


▲ Valli Ilaiyaraaja in her Dharavi home.

Some scientists have suggested the impressive numbers aren’t entirely the result of public-health measures. Antibody surveys over the summer found that almost 60% of the population in certain Mumbai slums had coronavirus antibodies, indicating that a degree of herd immunity could be at work. But even the most fatalistic virologists credit Dighavkar’s model with keeping mortality low, with some help from a youthful population. At just 270 confirmed deaths, Dharavi has one of the lowest Covid-19 fatality rates of any urban area in India, and methods developed there are now being rolled out across the country as the disease tears through smaller cities.

“This is our own invention. Contactless entry”

The apparent containment of the virus in Dharavi, or at least of its worst effects, didn’t spare its people economically. Many have had experiences like those of Valli Ilaiyaraaja, who used to work as a cleaner for three families in a neighborhood near the slum, and said none would allow her back even after the national lockdown ended in June. Their apartment buildings had banned entry to outside help, out of fear that cleaners and cooks would bring the virus with them. Similar policies remain in place across the city.

This has resulted in some inconvenience for Mumbai’s middle and upper classes—one local company had to suspend sales of dishwashers because of an overwhelming volume of orders. But it’s a financial catastrophe for people like Ilaiyaraaja. She and her three young daughters now depend entirely on her husband, who lost his job as a welder during the lockdown and is making just 100 rupees ($1.37) a day loading trucks. That’s not enough to pay for the cost of traveling to their home village in South India, where they could live rent-free, nor to cover school tuition for the girls. So the family is in limbo, waiting both for the economy to pick up and for the stigma attached to slum dwellers to fade. “We are fed up with this virus,” Ilaiyaraaja said in her tiny tenement apartment, two of her daughters sitting shyly by her side, “and with waiting for this nightmare to be over.”

On a muggy summer day, seven anxious-looking people, all wearing masks, stepped off a minibus and into a large vinyl tent that had taken over a parking lot on Dharavi’s outskirts. The tent housed a 192-bed field hospital for Covid-19 cases and had been carefully designed to triage incoming patients without letting them spread the virus. Past the double doors the group entered a spacious holding area monitored by a thermal camera on a tripod. Just behind, in a sealed-off observation booth, Dr. Asad Khan issued instructions through a microphone while observing the camera feed on a monitor.

When the system detected a fever, the monitor was supposed to show a red box around a patient, while normal temperatures would prompt a green box. The trouble, though, was that all the boxes were green—not something a physician greeting confirmed coronavirus carriers would expect to see. This prompted Khan to query the new arrivals on why they’d been brought to his tent. A young man stepped forward as the group’s unofficial spokesperson, and after some back and forth, Khan learned that none of them had even been tested for the virus. They were contacts of positive cases and were supposed to have been taken to an isolation center, not the hospital. A few minutes later they climbed back into their vehicle and were driven away.

Dighavkar, watching from inside the booth, was pleased. A bus going to the wrong facility was a harmless mix-up, but letting seven potentially healthy people interact with infectious Covid-19 patients would have been a disaster. The thermal camera and Khan’s questioning had prevented that outcome—evidence, to Dighavkar, that the system was working. “This is our own invention,” he said of the camera-and-interview process. “This is the procedure. Contactless entry.”


▲ Dr. Khan screens patients.

He was conscious, though, that a system sufficient to contain the virus with the economy halted could be severely tested by the resumption of more activity. By July some parts of Dharavi were coming slowly back to life. Beggars had returned to intersections, though usually wearing masks as they shuffled from car to car. Fabric wholesalers had rolled up their steel shutters, while corner stores were again places for groups of local women to meet and chat.

What worried Dighavkar was the prospect of reopening factories—cramped, poorly ventilated places where laborers spend hours on end, elbow-to-elbow. “Once the factories start again, maybe we’ll get more cases,” he said in his office. In front of his broad wooden desk, someone had set up neat rows of chairs to allow subordinates to gather before him like students at an assembly. “We have to make sure safety measures are taken.” His most urgent priority was to get as much protective gear to workers as possible. The municipal government had been distributing masks, gloves, face shields, and sanitizer to factories for free, turning a blind eye to illegal operations in the hope that owners would accept help. Regardless of their official status, “we are here to take care of them,” Dighavkar said.

The future of Dharavi’s manufacturing sector may look like International Footsteps, a factory that makes sandals for Western mall brands such as Aldo. To get there, you must first turn off one of the slum’s raucous commercial drags and into a lane of decrepit buildings covered in tarps and corrugated steel sheets, which opens after a little while into something of a public square. There, if you skip between a puddle of foul water and a dead rat, then duck beneath a tangle of electrical wires, you’ll come to a dark, damp tunnel leading to what feels like a different world. In a pristine marble hallway, a multilingual sign asks visitors to apply some hand sanitizer from a dispenser on the wall. Just beyond is a bright workshop, where during a recent visit eight artisans sat cross-legged at workstations spaced about two feet apart—considerably less jammed-in than they would have been before this year. Managers had cleared out some upstairs storage space to allow more distance between each employee, and all of them were wearing disposable smocks, masks, and plastic face shields, purchased at the company’s expense. The protection raises costs, “but it’s required for the safety of everyone,” said floor manager Vijayanti Kewlani, who’d donned the same gear.

The problem, for International Footsteps as well as other businesses in Dharavi, is that “everyone” isn’t who it used to be. Only about two-thirds of the slum’s people are formal residents; the rest are rural migrants who traditionally slept on factory floors or shared rented rooms, returning to their hometowns a few times a year. But there was no government help to cover wages during the national lockdown, and it caused a severe crisis for these laborers. With snack bars and mess halls shut, even those who could afford food struggled to find enough to eat.


▲ Workers at International Footsteps.

Many had little choice but to go home, a journey that had to be made on foot, because the government had suspended train and bus services to contain infections. It was likely the country’s largest forced migration since Partition, the violent 1947 division of India and Pakistan—and had the unintended result of spreading the coronavirus deep into rural areas. With the global economic slump depressing activity in cities, a large proportion of the migrants have stayed in the countryside.

International Footsteps tried to keep connected with its workers, paying them 80% of their salaries for the first month of lockdown and 60% for the second. It also offered to cover the cost of transportation back to the city and is looking into securing more spacious housing—maybe even with the luxury of an attached toilet—for staff who return. But only 30% of its personnel have resumed their jobs, mostly Dharavi locals, leaving the company well short of the numbers it might need to fill large orders.

Suraj Ahmed was one of the few who’d come back—in his case from a small village in Uttar Pradesh. He couldn’t afford to live in the room he’d been sharing with two co-workers, because neither had yet returned. So the company was letting him stay on the premises for free, until he could find a more permanent arrangement. The visible precautions in the factory made him feel safer, Ahmed said as he attached a finely worked leather strap to the top of a new sandal, his wiry beard peeking out from under his mask. But he was more impressed with the 10% raise he’d received for coming back to work. “I have to earn a living,” he said.

Despite its absent workers and stepped-up protective measures, Dharavi could still provide an extremely hospitable environment for the virus—particularly if a rush of returning migrants reintroduces it at large scale. The only solution, Dighavkar says, is “screening, screening, screening,” an unrelenting effort to track down infected people and isolate them from the community. “It will be part of our continuous process from now on.”

The front line of Dighavkar’s plan will be made up of women. His department has assembled an army of almost 6,000 health workers and volunteers, mainly from Dharavi itself, who’ve been given thermometers, pulse oximeters, and basic training in how to spot Covid-19. The idea is to send them house to house, day after day, in continuous sweeps of every part of the slum, and to keep doing it until the end of the pandemic. It’s a substantial commitment of resources, but the human and economic toll of a renewed outbreak would be far larger.

One morning in July, after one of the heaviest monsoon rainfalls Mumbai had seen in years, about a dozen of these women gathered at a public hospital to collect their addresses for the day and suit up in protective gear. Some undertook a tricky maneuver that involved pulling the hems of their saris up and back between their legs, tucking the fabric behind their waists, to step into the white coveralls they’d been issued. After drawing the hoods over their hair, they looked a little like snowmen.


▲ Bhoyar prepares to visit Dharavi residents.

Sunanda Bhoyar was more practically attired, in a block-print tunic over billowy pink trousers, and donned her suit with ease. She was one of the group’s few professionals, a registered nurse assigned to guide the less-experienced workers. She soon set off into the heart of Dharavi’s residential quarter, a warren of footpaths and alleyways often too narrow for a pair of people to walk abreast. There was almost no sunlight, the result of haphazard additions that had pushed the buildings on either side to structurally questionable heights.

Bhoyar knew the way and soon found what she was looking for: the home of an elderly couple who’d just tested positive and were being treated in hospital. She told the young