‘Mountain Tales’ review: Where home is a rubbish mountain 20 storeys high

A gut-wrenching story of the poor and marginalised who work and live at Mumbai’s Deonar landfill to earn their daily bread

Rag pickers live off what the rest of the world throws away. They lead invisible lives in the landfills that keep growing, stagnating and putrefying with items discarded by the city’s rich. The dark trail of modern life is seen and felt everywhere.

Journalist Saumya Roy, who spent eight years researching the impact of urbanisation, over-consumption and waste mismanagement in Maximum City, describes it as ‘discarded desires’ of the moneyed-people. The grossness of disparity between the world of the rich and the poor compelled her to explore the lives of rag pickers in 2013, when she co-founded Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai’s poorest micro-entrepreneurs.