Comment

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

[Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity]
Feb 24, 2017
This is the best examination I’ve come across about poor people and how they interact with each other; how they manage their poverty in order to survive; and how they relate with government officials when the opportunity arises. Having spent considerable time in reporting on needy communities in the United States, and winning a Pulitzer Prize for it, apparently, the author turned to the poorest on earth and produced a superb examination of their lives in a novelized form. She deservedly won a National Book Award for her effort. The story, based on real people, apparently, follows the lives of garbage collectors, young and old, as they go about their neurotic and sometimes psychopathic existence on the edge of a growing modern airport. Every day represents a test of their ability to survive against all odds including crooked and corrupt government officials who exploit them without pity. Over all, the reader learns that there are poor people, and there are poor people. They’re not all the same, and they don’t all respond to their deprivation in the same manner. And, perhaps, most of all, they can claw at each other, if they have to, in order to survive. When I began reading this book I marveled at the author’s ability to peer so intimately at the lives of her characters, and wondered how she captured the details. I’ve read many other works about poor people, mostly rural folks in Latin American, but none that honed in so sharply. In the last pages the author explains briefly her use of sociological science methods which aided her in amassing the overwhelming details which she then sorted out in order to fashion a complicated novel—too complicated for me, forcing me to skim and then finally re-evaluate the work. My rethinking produced the conclusions offered in the 1st paragraph here. It’s a masterful piece of work, no doubt.