Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Women wearing the hijab have been barred from educational institutions in another part of the country. Part of a mosque was razed recently in the Capital, defying a court order. As I write this column, in the so-called glory days of Swachh Bharat, a big landfill in Delhi is on fire, throwing the lives and livelihoods of millions of waste workers, who are a key focus of Boo’s story, into jeopardy.

Rereading it a decade on, I was besieged with an uncanny sense of déjà vu. It’s an evergreen Indian plot, no doubt, simmering with communal tension, caste violence, jingoism, jugaad, you name it. Having chronicled the lives of America’s poor for years, Boo brought to her reporting incredible powers of observation, attention and empathy, all of which are part of the toolkit of the world’s finest storytellers.īoo, who is married to the historian Sunil Khilnani, spent nearly four years in a slum called Annawadi, near Mumbai’s international airport, to track the lives of three families living there, all of them connected by a gruesome tragedy. For the Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer with The New Yorker, though, it wasn’t a passing interest.

Poverty, at its basest, full of the grinding abjection and indignity of life, is at the core of Behind The Beautiful Forevers.

After all, its subject had been a long-time favourite of Westerners-from 19th century Orientalists to foreign correspondents, who periodically parachuted into South Asia to mine its inexhaustible reserves of grotesquerie. There were rave reviews, but rumblings, too, in some quarters. On a freezing January morning in 2012, as a handful of publishers, journalists, writers and bibliophiles headed for the annual Jaipur Literature Festival on the early morning Shatabdi Express from Delhi, the buzz around the compartment was about one book alone: the American journalist Katherine Boo’s Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, And Hope In A Mumbai Undercity, which was hot off the press and had created a major stir, especially in India.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo