Globalization In Katherine Boo's Novel Behind The Beautiful Forevers

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

The new worlds emerging from such phenomena go beyond the personal, for the country they left behind is changed as well as the one to which they go. The Indian diaspora contains a high number of professionals, making for a global expatriate community with a strong measure of influence and clout. Chaudhuri’s novel is a gently told, convincing glimpse into the life of one ordinary non-resident Indian, stated in deceptively simple, elegantly rendered.

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 narrator of Hari Kunzuru’s short story, “Raj Bohemian” faces an existential crisis when he is introduced to a scheming manipulator. The story revolves around an urban

As Mehta describes the Bombay of his youth, the reader is given a nostalgic view of what the city used to be. As a child, growing up there he is not the outsider that he becomes when his family moves to New York. He describes this experience as a, “central event, that fulcrum of time,” which shaped the rest of his life (6). Subsequently, throughout the rest of his childhood he desires to go back to Bombay and to leave New York, a place

“Out of the Mountains” predicts that these large urban centers will become the equivalent to the city-states of antiquity (Kilcullen 2013). Kilcullen (2013) identifies the contemporary global theatre as one which is experiencing rabid urban growth, and predicts that conflict will also steadily urbanize over time. When cities grow rapidly, they often do so without the proper planning and design that efficient communities require to function (Kilcullen 2013). Kilcullen’s (2013) argument citing urbanization as a factor in future environments is based around the assumption that local municipalities will fail to institute adequate planning measures to match population growth. He provides the example of the attacks on Mumbai as proof that rapidly urbanized areas foster irregular

Squatter is a short story that depicts the challenges faced by immigrants and their experiences while on their journey but is also described as 'an insoluble dilemma'. (Prescott, 2008, p. 232). The author, Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay, currently known as Mumbai,

Katherine "Kate" J. Boo (born August 12, 1964) is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (2000), the MacArthur "genius" award (2002), and the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012). She has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the National Book Award for

Jhumpa Lahiri’s characters in her anthology ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ do face moments of unhappiness, however her characters are not always isolated in darkness. Many of Lahiri’s characters suffocate on their migrant experiences, struggling to let go of their home culture; India. Despite this, Lahiri suggests that the light can indeed be found in migrants’ lives if they maintain their connections with their birth place and accept their new fates, evident by incorporating and exploring happy moments for her characters who do so. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story Mrs. Sen’s, character Mrs Sen is Lahiri’s study of the classic case of a migrant who fails to adapt to their new life and fit into new culture; experiencing the inability to let go of the old culture.

For two weeks, Kevin McCloud visits one of India’s largest slums, Dharavi, to experience the livelihood of such environments. Dharavi is Asia’s largest and most densely populated place, with one million people living in a one square mile area. Kevin experiences living in slum where water is contaminated, sanitation is basic and disease is abundant.

Moreover, if Los Angeles is the city that illustrates globalization, could it also be the place where we begin to imagine what comes afterward? As a matter of fact, the novel uses techniques that offer a complex, multi-layered map of “global cultures,” in Los Angeles that insist the visions of globalization is seen as “capitalism” (Yamashita 132). Furthermore, the imaginary lines in particular are challenged by the economic and national borders, which divides an otherwise “natural community” (119). On one hand, this allows free goods and capitalism, but on the other hand, it restricts the migration of people.

Loneliness, busyness, no care to others which are very common in an urbanized city. I feel Kamala das is hoping Mumbai to offer its tears,

“The 1 to 2 billion poorest in the world, who don't have food for the day, suffer from the worst disease: globalization deficiency. The way globalization is occurring could be much better, but the worst thing is not being part of it. For those people, we need to support good civil societies and government” (Rosling). In Little Bee by Chris Cleave, globalization has been shown to affect Little Bee very negatively. Little Bee is a Nigerian child who was forced to leave Nigeria. She was forced to do this because “the men” were going to kill her if she stayed there. These “men” were oil men, who had taken over Little Bee’s village for an oil company. The men killed everyone in Little Bee’s village because they wanted to cover up what the oil company