Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

(In addition to her field reporting she has also “used more than three thousand public records.”) But, as her reporting painstakingly reveals, the effect of any single policy is dwarfed by the general mad siphoning of money into private hands that goes on at every turn and every income level. Here, too, she writes about a number of different laws and policies that come to bear on the lives of Annawadians. What are the prospects for a young man with broadened sympathies and a sharpened sense of justice back in Annawadi? Abdul’s first resolution is not to trade in stolen recyclables, which he normally buys and sells with the legally scavenged trash.īoo has never put forward policy suggestions or articulated political ideals, but in her American reporting she has considered the effects of specific policy initiatives on the lives of the people she writes about. It is surrounded by new luxury hotels, which make it “magnificently positioned for a trafficker in rich people’s garbage.” Lest you get the wrong idea: “Almost no one in this slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks.” In spite of the fact that a few residents have to trap frogs and rats to fill out their meals, the slum is officially reckoned a success story, full of people on their way out of poverty, and the frog-eaters give other, non-frog-eating Annawadians “a felt sense of their own upward mobility.” Annawadi was built illegally on land next to the Mumbai International Airport and is under constant threat of slum clearance. The slum is home to 3,000 people (crammed into 335 huts) and unknown numbers of goats, feral pigs, and water buffalo. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is the product of Boo’s three and a half years of reporting (with the help of translators) in Annawadi. Although profane bargaining was the norm in the waste business, he felt his mother acceded to that norm with too much relish.”Ībdul and Zehrunisa are two of a handful of Annawadians whose fortunes Boo follows closely in the book. In Abdul’s view, her “one great flaw” is “the language she used when haggling. He works with his mother, Zehrunisa, who haggles with the waste-pickers. Abdul buys recyclables that the neighborhood’s waste-pickers have scavenged and then resells it in bulk to local recycling plants.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo