Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity Kindle Edition

I'm an American and I've lived and worked in West Africa for over 5 years (3 of them as a Peace Corps volunteer). I've found that it's incredibly challenging to peal away the cultural onion, especially in writing. It took me three years before I felt that I had a grasp on the rhythm and flow of the community I was living in, including the styles of communication (nonverbal communication, decoding indirectness), the practice of saving face, concepts of time, concepts of power, attitudes towards uncertainty, family life, the boundaries of friendship, decision-making when living in extreme poverty, etc. There is so much difference. You have to marinate in the difference to become aware of it, and then adopt the difference to understand it.

Katherine Boo is blessed with perception, awareness and understanding. I was blown away by her ability to capture the everyday judgements, intentions and attitudes of the residents of Annawadi and to provide an intimate looks into the oppression, corruption and abuse of poverty.

 This is an astonishing book which I finished in two sittings. It's really three books in one:
-- It reads like a novel, even a thriller, not a book of nonfiction. Katherine Boo drops you into the action from the very first page: a diligent and principled boy escaping from the authorities for a crime he didn't commit. She gets you inside the head of the 16-year old garbage collector, his fears, his motivations, his rat-infested pile of trash which is his only hiding place. From there, she radiates out into the entire slum of Annawadi, into the minds of few dozen other characters from the 3000 families huddled around a sewage lake next to the gleaming Mumbai Airport and its luxury hotels.
-- It's an extraordinary feat of reporting. For the central event of the book, Boo does 168 interviews. Additionally, she digs up 3000 government documents (no mean feat in the Indian bureaucracy) and spends 4 years of being right there with these folks. As a result, you come to understand the interconnectedness of all the lives of these complex, talented, vibrant people: their ethnic, religious and caste strife; their dealings with systemic corruption wherever they go; and the wages of crushing poverty, how they adapt to it, how they hope to escape to a better life. The suffering is real and deep, yet somehow Katherine Boo conveys the heartbreak without being preachy or sentimental.
-- It's also a call to action. You cannot read this book without having it soften your heart, expand your circle of compassion, understand the global consequences of everything we do, and have greater gratitude for all the privileges many of us take for granted.

The writing is also fluidly beautiful. This book is one of the best I've read in any genre. Read it to understand life a little better.
-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer

I live in Brazil, a country of great social inequality, but even so the misery and cruelty shown in Behind the Beautiful Forevers is impressive. This work, winner of the 2012’s National Book Award and written by Pulitzer winner Katherine Boo, is the result of three years she spent in Annawadi, a slum in Mumbai, India.

The title is a reference to an outdoor of Italian luxury mosaics that faces the city’s modern international airport; and Annawadi is right behind, like a black humor joke. It is a place of hunger and constant disease. Where people sleep in the middle of trash and are bitten by rats during the night. Where the fight for survivor surfaces a greedy and cruel side in the neighbors, the police corruption and politics. A place where people supplement their meager diet with rats and frogs from a fetid lagoon. Annawadi shows the combination of the darkest side of globalization with the Indian cast system, defined in the book as “the most perfectly oppressive labor division system ever conceived”.

Most of the story revolves around a Muslim family in the place of Hindu majority. They are accused of being responsible for the suicide of a one-legged woman. She set fire to herself because the renovation of a shared wall made dust fall in her rice, and wanted to teach a lesson to the neighbors that went too far. The lawsuit against the father of the family and his son extends for years and becomes a nightmare, revealing an endemic corruption in each and every level of the official system. The Indian bureaucracy seems like a big machine to forget the poor.

“In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.”

One day the Indian press does visit this place of poverty and injustice because of a death. Of a horse. A few days before, a garbage collector was ran over and died after pleading for help for hours in an active road. They took him out of there when he was already dead and the coroner determined – without an autopsy – that he died of tuberculosis, so that it wouldn’t smudge the region’s statistics.

The facts are amazing, and the execution of Behind the Beautiful Forevers too. The author used over a thousand hours of video, photographs and audio interviews to write the book. And Boo also has an incredible sensibility to find the right stories and the literary talent to transcribe them.

One of the best non-fiction books I have read. A deep immersion in an incredible theme, with incredible execution, multiple sources, long time of research. A must-read for journalists, those interested in modern India, or any human being.