Behind The Beautiful Forevers By Katherine Boo Essay

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

Macy Queen is the main character and protagonist in this novel. She is short for her age, with a round face, brown eyes, blond hair, and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. Macy is afraid to speak out, thanks to the grief of her father dying, and Macy’s mother, Deborah, is also not over the grief. Deborah forces Macy to aim for perfection and appear calm and collected; “But part of my new perfect act was my appearance… I was still in front of the mirror, parting and reparting my hair… it still didn’t look right” (17). While still working at the library for her boyfriend at camp, Macy starts working for a small catering business, and finally feels like she belongs somewhere, “...I was stepping out of the careful box I’d drawn around

Aubrey’s mum turned up and told Aubrey that she didn’t come because some days are too hard

As a first generation Indian-American, I am no stranger to being a part of a distinct community while observing two unique cultures. Traveling to India exposed me to a dynamic population with rich diversity comprising of numerous languages and differing religions. Though these individuals may have had differing customs from their neighbors, there were similar ambitions to conquer grinding poverty. This poverty can be clearly noticed by seeing citizens sleeping on floors of a railway station, or the lack of air conditioning in searing hot weather. The frailty and mortality of the human condition was starkly visible in India. As a fellow human, I was humbled not only by the lack of privilege and opportunity of many citizens, but also by their

“Beauty” by Tony Hoagland was written in 1998. In this poem, Hoagland expresses his feelings on how women care too much about physical appearances. Throughout his poem he tells the story through the eyes of a brother of a girl who learns to love herself for who she is. Hoagland’s poem stresses the importance that beauty goes deeper than the surface. Throughout his poem, Tony Hoagland uses many literary devices to perfect his poem. These devices include the message, tone, imagery, figures of speech, and personification.

“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.

The article, “The Girl Who Lived Forever”, by Kristen Lewis, describes the hardships of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl, and her family, who like millions of other Jews, perished at the hands of the Nazis during WWII. Anne Frank lived during one of the most terrifying and horrific historical events the world has ever seen, the Holocaust. She and her family managed to survive for 2 long years in hiding, by living in a secret annex behind her father’s pectin factory. In August of 1944, the SS captured Anne and the others hiding in the annex. All but Otto Frank, Anne’s father, perished in the Nazi concentration camps. Though they lived through unspeakable and unimaginable challenges, Anne, her family and their friends showed a tremendous amount of courage trying to defy Hitler and his evil regime.

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

Despite the many attempts to eliminate poverty, the problem has never been solved. Even though these efforts have helped lower the numbers of people becoming poverty-stricken every year it the numbers still seems to progress. In the novel Behind the Beautiful Forevers Author, Katherine Boo brings a different perspective. Boo takes the reader into the Annawadi slum of Mumbai, India. The Slum was presented a jumbled, filthy and impoverished area hidden from the view of westerners and better-off Indian citizens beyond the concrete wall. Her Novel Serves as a snapshot into the lives of the impoverished people of Annawadi and a great comparison to poverty lines in America. In this essay, I will compare the way that Katherine Boo has presented the miserable lives of those in the slums and the poverty-stricken in America today.

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.

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.

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

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.

To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me ye women if you can.

The novel show about Mumbai culture, tradition, Landscape and behavior of the people. While reading the novel “The White Tiger” there is a urge that due to poverty the protagonist who is from pelor family his master. Not only poverty