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Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity / Katherine Boo

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Bordering the access roads that lead to the gleaming new hotels around the modern Mumbai airport, frequently out of sight behind barrier fences plastered with oversized posters advertising a lifestyle unobtainable for most Indians (adverts with the words “Beautiful Forever”), live the underlings of the commercial and entertainment capital of India.  Slumdwellers occupy land that will one day, probably without adequate advanced warning, be reclaimed by the airport authority. Crushing poverty, political corruption, police intimidation, and the challenge of everyday life make suicide by rat poison or self-immolation recurring events in this book. The main storyline centers on the conflict between two families in the slum of Annawadi.  Was the suicide of one motivated by the actions of another?  An entire family is dragged into jail and court, and regardless of their eventual guilt or innocence, their house of cards, their tenuous hold on survival, on life, collapses.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers keeps popping up on the 2012 best of the year lists.  I downloaded it to my Nook some time ago and just recently got around to reading it.  I had forgotten it was nonfiction (one of those things that’s hard to tell sometimes on an eReader).  It certainly reads like a novel.  The Annawadi slum has real-life Dickensian characters like Oliver Twist and the western reader will be shocked with how these juveniles eke out a hand-to-mouth existence in such deplorable conditions.

A sobering insight into one of the world’s rising economies.

National Book Award for Nonfiction 2012
Excerpts: 
Every country has its myths, and one that successful Indians liked to indulge was a romance of instability and adaptation-- the idea that their country’s rapid rise derived in part from the chaotic unpredictability of daily life.  In America and Europe, it was said, people know what is going to happen when they turn on the water tap or flick the light switch.  In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers. 
Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating.  “We try so many things,” as one Annawadi girl put it, “but the world doesn’t move in our favor.” p. 196
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But the slumdwellers rarely got mad together… 
Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another.  Sometimes […] they destroyed themselves in the process.  When they were fortunate […] they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people. p210

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