Behind The Beautiful Forevers Analysis

“I wanted to be successful. I definitely didn't want to be poor.” Said Andrew Cherng, this quote clearly represents how people in Annawadi thinks by surviving and searching opportunities to get out of the slum area and live a better life or a better future for them and their family. As I see in slums such as Annawadi I saw many opportunity for them to succeed such as Abdul family was doing pretty okay as a trash recycler until the family was accused in killing Fatima in the fire. As I believed there are many ways of getting out of poverty, but for me the one of the best way of getting out of poverty such as in Annawadi is through corruption.

In reading the first parts of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, the primary setting of Annawadi was not often described in a glowing light. The area gave me the image of a worse off poorer part of an inner city. The slum seemed to be rather crowded, often very dirty with trash being abound, unclean sewage water being prevalent, overall a rather unnerving place to live. Looking more towards the conditions of the population of Annawadi, there is not a whole lot of positive to be gleaned from here. The majority of the slum’s citizens do not have stable paying jobs, forcing people to undertake very unconventional paths to gain money, such as Sunil, who like a number of people, gain money by scavenging through garbage. Additionally due to the unsettled

Many Children in the world face challenges that most people don’t have to. For example, two of his people face very hard challenges, Abdul, and Kundila. Two people who have it harder in life then us.In these stories, Doris Pilkington, and Katherine Boo amazingly show the challenges these two people face. In Katherine Boo’s story, Abdul has to work for his family to raise money to move to a better neighborhood. In Doris Pilkington’s story, Kundila has to protect his family from the white raiders.

Political Corruption has been around for many years, some people believe that it that it’s about elections and riggings. But it’s not people take advantages of opportunities rather than corrupting urban politics. ‘’Political Corruption was widespread during the Progressive Era because the Progressive movements were eliminating problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and corruption in the government’’. It really means the abuse of political power by government leaders. “www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/opinion/thomas-edsall-the-value-of-political-corruption.html.

Katherine Boo’s book, Behind The Beautiful Forevers, portrays the “new life” the people in India live as capitalism and globalism ventures into their lives. These two systems look to promise new and improved social opportunities for all classes, not just the wealthy. However, although this makes it seem like the government of India in the 21st century is progressing towards a more fairer society for all its citizens, the reality is, they are really not progressing at all. Of course, while capitalism and globalization initially gave all citizens, especially the lower classes, hope that more opportunities would be available to them, it seems it has prevaricated it all as these opportunities have been more transformative to the elite and privileged classes than it has for the poor.

While it may be easier to persuade yourself that Boo’s published stories are works of fiction, her writings of the slums that surround the luxury hotels of Mumbai’s airport are very, very real. Katherine Boo’s book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers – Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” does not attempt to solve problems or be an expert on social policy; instead, Boo provides the reader with an objective window into the battles between extremities of wealth and poverty. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” then, exposes the paucity and corruption prevalent within India.

Katherine Boo, a staff writer at The New Yorker and former reporter and editor at The Washington Post, has worked for over two decades “reporting within poor communities, considering how societies distribute opportunity and how individuals get out of poverty” (Boo 257). In November 2007, she and her husband, an Indian citizen, moved from the United States to India to study a group of slum dwellers in Annawadi, Mumbai (Boo 249). While studying this group of individuals in India from 2007 to 2011, Boo’s goal was to learn why the individuals within this slum have not banded together against a common enemy in order to gain upward mobility. She illustrates several common issues of developing nations including: corruption, education, the mismanagement of foreign aid, and the possibility for social mobility in her book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. In this literary work, Boo accurately portrays the acts of corruption and as well as how corruption has entered the sphere of education, which is typically an individual’s only avenue to social mobility and success in that area. She argues that instead of rising up against a higher power, the individuals within the slum fight against one another to get a leg up on their competition, even if it keeps them in the same social class.

I believe that the community of India is hopeless. I believe this because by comparing their community to ours, there isn’t really much hope for recovery in their present situation. The poverty in India is different from the poverty in the United States. Between India and the U.S., homes, revenue, and jobs are drastically different. In the U.S., homes are bigger and are built by organization who help those who live in poverty. Those who are homeless are presented with food stamps as a way of currency so they can survive. Also for those who live in poverty in the U.S. are presented with more jobs and more opportunities than the people of India. These differences show how even though both India and the United States have similar economic difficulties, one almost has no hope of return.

Poverty and oppression is a serious condition that is prevalent even in today’s modern society. Women and children are exposed to poverty and subjected to a life of injustice. One of the countries where such problems still occur is in India. Despite the country’s modernization, there lies an undercity where the disparity of wealth is transparent. These social problems are thoroughly described in movies and literature such as Slumdog Millionaire and Behind the Beautiful Forevers. In the book Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Catherine Boo, the author describes slum life for a set of individuals and the hardship that their social conditions confined them to. Another movie that gave insight to slum life in India is Slumdog Millionaire

The author Mike Davis has done countless research on the topic of urban poverty. In his studies he collects and receives his information from other sources. Perhaps this is the reason why he has a negative view on slums. This is illustrated in his piece “Planet of Slums” as he discusses the politics, urban development, and methods within the slums population. According to Davis, slums and urban poverty have and will continue to significantly increase. While doing so, the gap in exclusion and inequality will grow. As a result, this will weaken urban elites in their work to utilize cities as engines of growth. Slums and slum population are classified as those who are living below the poverty lines, all while, being associated with overcrowding, having poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure. This is being recognized as an international phenomenon. To emphasis this phenomenon, approximately half of the slum population in most

In the book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, author Katherine Boo sheds light on the topic of corruption. Corruption is something that is seen everywhere, but varies in depth. She chooses to focus on India, because she is fascinated with how so many people are impoverished while others prosper. Boo is able to convey both the benefits and downfalls of corruption within a community by deciding to only focus on a sliver of people from a single slum. She chooses to focus on the citizens from a slum called Annawadi due to sense of possibility in the community. Boo decides to watch this community for several years to see who gets ahead, who doesn’t,

The city of Mumbai has seen much growth in the past years. A string of elegant hotels have been set up for travelers and high-class business men. An ever growing, top of the line airport has been built for those coming in and out of the country. From the outside, Mumbai seems to have taken a liking to being internationally integrated with the rest of world, otherwise known as globalization. This is not the case, however; as seen in Katherine Boo’s novel Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. This novel is set in a slum right next to the Mumbai International Airport called

Corruption is a complex political, social, and economic anomaly that negatively affects developing and developed countries. It weakens democratic institutions, holds economic development, widening the rich-poor gap and certainly leads to governmental instability. The World Bank definition of corruption states that “…the abuse of public office for private gain”.

Political corruption has existed throughout the ages. It believed to be most prominent in positions of power, because of the role money plays in getting people power. However, over the centuries, corruption has changed so much so as to not match a particular definition of corruption, perpetually growing deceptively harder to find (Ebbe).

The government also promises to the poor, better schools and hospitals. Balram’s father died because there was improper medical care in their home town, and the life expectancy in India is only 66.8 years. There are nearly 1,189,172,906 people in India and only 61% of the people living in India are literate. In New Delhi, though, the government does fulfill its promises to the rich. They live unaware and uncaring of the slums surrounding their middle class lives. The government makes promises of better livelihoods to its people that are never fulfilled; causing India’s poor to remain in the slums and the government to have little understanding of the problems poor people face.