Katherine Boo’s up-close sociological project, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, goes inside the slums to meet the residents of India’s most down and out.
Children eat garbage, neighbors clash, only the very few hope for educational advancement out of the slums. When one women sets fire to herself, (not uncommon in the Hindu culture) she blames her neighbors with more money than she. The dog eats the dog in impoverished, hopeless segments of society. Juxtaposed with the western influence of expensive hotels and excess, the children of the slums move like ghosts around the travelers and workers in the tourist hotels outside the airport. They scavenge for leftover food from the cab drivers lined up at the arrivals gate, and when that doesn’t work, they creatively source out their own pockets of garbage and cast off from the luckier lots.
Government corruption, organizations that prosecute pet owners for not providing adequate shelter for animals, when they can barely feed themselves. Lawless police. Morals and money are in short supply in the Mumbai slums, and after reporting about it for more than three years, Boo asks what can the society do to lift these large segments of the population up. Her greatest achievement in the book is in the conviction that while it is safe to assume from far away that these people are bad, many of them, in fact, with very little, still try to be good.
