Shekhar Kapur's Paani

TIME Asia Magazine: The Numbers Man -- Mar. 21, 2005: "For the first time he can remember, India's richest film-maker is having trouble with his math. Specifically, how 600,000 goes into 175. The first figure is the population of Dharavi, Asia's most populous slum, which he's currently exploring. The second is the number of hectares Dharavi covers in Bombay, an area half the size of New York City's Central Park. In a different life, Shekhar Kapur spent seven years crunching numbers as a corporate planner for a multinational oil company. He surveys the tiny one-room lean-tos where teeming families live shoulder to shoulder in spaces that double as hole-in-the-wall shops, goat sheds or miniature factories producing dyes, glues and shiny tin boxes. It just doesn't seem possible. 'Look at this place,' he says. 'Look how they adapt.'

What really stumps Kapur is the giant water pipe on which he's balancing. The duct cuts through the maze of rubbish-strewn roofs and filthy alleys to carry water to the seafront Art Deco apartments of Colaba, the flashiest neighborhood in India's most swanky town. But here in Dharavi, a lost city under the overpasses linking the airport with the steel-and-glass blocks downtown, the only running water is what seeps out of cracks in the pipe. Which brings Kapur to other difficult digits. Like 150, the number of working toilets in Dharavi. Or 20, the number of years Kapur gives Bombay before it divides forever into rich and poor, high-rise city and low-rise slum, where 25 floors up there's water for Jacuzzis but down below there's barely enough for life.

The calculation leads Kapur to two conclusions. One: 'Water will soon be the world's most valuable commodity, and places like Dharavi will have none.' Two: he's going to make a film about it. This project, Water (Paani in Hindi), has become such an obsession that despite commitments to direct Morgan Freeman in a film about Nelson Mandela and Cate Blanchett and"