Opening Night : The Scene From The Airport Slums

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 first feeling of this story is that the boy and his father struggle with their relationship, but as it unfolds, the reader sees how they do care for each other. It also becomes easier to spot the difficulties of communicating within a broken family. The father does a fine job to of turning the boy’s scheduling obsessions into a positive for the boy by noting it as one of his strong points.

The setting of the poor inner city helps us realize how unevenly the pie is split up between members of society. As close as the inner city is to Manhattan, they are worlds apart in terms of social class and wealth. The lesson that the children take out of the field trip with Ms. Moore directly related to the fact that these children have been raised less fortunately that some, and to get out of oppression and poverty, they will have to work. The children realize the value of money and how unfair it is that there is so much wealth in Manhattan and a stone 's throw away in the inner city, there is extreme poverty. The children learn social gaps are very wide, and by leaving their ghetto area they some to she that in comparison to Manhattan, they are all receiving the small slice of the American pie. Miss Moore and the Manhattan trip help the children realize that poverty is not found everywhere, and that education can give them the power to elevate their status.

“Boy that’s all you are, that’s what all of you are. You are a piece of garbage” (P. 66). Trash by Andy Mulligan opens our eyes to the mistreatment of people with a lower status in society due to poverty. Multiple problems are occurring in third world countries all around the globe such as corruption, poverty, and mistreatment. These problems have been brought to light in the book by using a remarkable storyline with a clever use of various language techniques. The storyline of the book is intense and impactful, it tells us about three young boys who were sorting through trash and find something astonishing that would change their’s and many others lives forever.

I feel the article explores the political conflicts that arise when aspirations collide across a generational divide marked by sharply different political agendas. The character Tricia is a young, single mother whose family and financial difficulties reflect the circumstances of the urban poor. Furthermore, she delivers a compelling performance in scenes that reflect just how city policies affect individuals.

There has been a tremendous change in East Harlem between class warfare and gentrification. East Harlem is one more economic factor to the city’s wealth per capita since the attack of September 11, 2000. It is Manhattan’s last remaining development and it is on the agenda of the tax revenue of our government. East Harlem has become a profit driven capitalism. Gentrification enforces capitalism, it does not separate people, it does not go against race, poor and the working class, it wages war on the poor and the working-class.

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.

From the start the novel is laden with the pressures that the main characters are exposed to due to their social inequality, unlikeness in their heredity, dissimilarity in their most distinctive character traits, differences in their aspirations and inequality in their endowments, let alone the increasingly fierce opposition that the characters are facing from modern post-war bourgeois society.

This collection of stories begins when the narrator Yunior and his brother Rafa who are 8 and 12, are sent to live with their uncle for the summer so their mother can work. Their father abandoned them when Yunior was 4 and their family lives in poverty, sometimes having to forgo food for clothes and other necessities. Their mother works sometimes 14 hour shifts, at a local chocolate factory while their grandfather watches them. When Yunior is 9 his father returns from the United States to bring them back. They live in an apartment and set up a new community in New Jersey. Although they still live in poverty, they do not want for food or other basic necessities. The stories then jump forward years to when Yunior is in high school and living with his mother. He works and helps pay the rent and other bills

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.

Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, predicts the direction in which the world’s cities are headed, and how the changes in living conditions are only going to deteriorate if certain trends continue. The title of his book explains Davis’s vision for the future of cities as he feels there is enough evidence pointing towards an exponential rise in slum populations across the world’s largest cities. Additionally, he expresses his opinion on many issues regarding the rapid rise in developing cities’ slum populations, although he offers very one-sided arguments geared towards those who feel the current system is causing more problems rather than improving current conditions. This causes Davis to overlook the problems of slums as resolvable through different modes of assistance such as international aid programs. Instead, he views aid programs as the root cause of imbalance created during industrialization. Throughout the book, Davis presents information that confirms his preconceptions towards the slums. Therefore, all the evidence that is presented by him portrays confirmation bias as Davis fails to mention anything about the resolution of the problem of the growing number of slums and instead sees this problem as unavoidable. Particularly, Davis’ writing, although intended for the general population, is more geared towards critics who have similar ideas. Instead of providing the means through which the economy could be improved and the problem of slums could be resolved, it is

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.

In the beginning of the movie one can tell that the less developed, or "slums",

An intense portrayal of life at the extremes, Born into Brothels is a movie that challenges our perception of human resilience. The documentary takes place in Calcutta, India, home to one of the oldest populations and religious doctrines in the world. India is a country with an extraordinary history, yet suffers from massive overpopulation, environmental degradation, extreme poverty, and religious strife. (https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/in.html) Calcutta is the second largest city in India and one of the largest in the world, the square mileage of its metropolitan area measured at 228.5 sq mi. Within this unforgiving landscape is the red light district, a city within a city, known to openly display many of society's