My uncle is building a new house. I went to visit it yesterday.

By Indian standards, this home is a castle. It's an apartment (everyone in Mumbai lives in apartments, since the per square foot price of real estate is at least as high as it is in Manhattan) but he has arranged for a foyer paved in Italian marble and steeply beveled glass in all the cabinets. All the furniture has been custom-made.

The work is still going on, and a few days ago I went to see the place. It's located in a "compound." Compounds are towers of luxury flats. Compounds typically have clubhouses with pools, tennis courts, gyms, libraries, yoga rooms, etc. Residents have access to clubhouse facilities for free, or for a limited fee.

We went up to the apartment. My uncle was giving me a tour of the room that will be the study/library. I went to the window to see the view. Beneath me, riding right up to the compound's back wall, was a pane of ridged tin roofs, laid at about 5.5 feet from the ground. The roofs touched each other.

"Oh. Yes. Those are Mumbai's famous slums."

Newspaper articles talk simultaneously about India's new elite - educated people who have made a mint in executive positions with all the multinational companies eager to serve the Indian market - and India's slums, where some of the world's poorest people live.

What most articles don't mention is that the rich and the poor live within spitting distance of each other. They share the same views of Mumbai.

Mumbai's slums have become so famous that it's only a matter of time before they come some type of tourist attraction. But despite the government's repeated efforts to resettle the residents elsewhere and reclaim the land, they probably won't succeed. That's because most of these slums are organized communities. There is an established leadership structure and natural channels for power to flow through. When the government threatens to raze the slums, the residents put up protests. Most of them have regular work in Mumbai, and they can't afford housing anywhere else in the vicinity. Many live in networks based around a particular ethnic identity with relatives from the same village.