Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo's first book "Beyond the Beautiful Forever" rises beyond journalism as it follows the life of a group of youngsters for a while in a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai's Sahar airport.

The book has gathered great reviews already. Joseph Lelyveld called it the "best piece of journalism to come out of India in the last fifty years". Shashi Tharoor and Jonathan Shinin, the editor of Caravan, have very high praise for it.

The lives of the children are blighted by the utter lack of prospects and their knowledge of it. That the stunted rag picker, Sunil, has a spurt of growth in the brief months when he turns into a thief, tells us of the kind of deprivation these children live in. They are in danger from corrupt policemen, their means of livelihood, and, some, even from their parents. These children are not free agents; they are prey. All this will not surprise an Indian reader.

What surprises is that the view of life is entirely from the children's eyes. The book gets its power by entering their minds, where the awful circumstances of their lives almost appear ordinary. This unswerving viewpoint brings us to understand that they are not statistics, they are individuals, with individual motivations and failures. In doing this the book rises beyond journalism to reach towards the psychological understanding of a novel.

Katherine Boo makes an appearance only in the last chapter where she writes about the methods that enabled her to enter the minds of children and teenagers who are not very expressive. This too is a fascinating insight, although to a different world: the motives and methods of a Pulitzer-winning journalist.

This is the true narrative of people in a Mumbai slum called Annawadi. While this may be something new or shocking from a westerner's point of view, I think every Indian knows this story. We hear it in our everyday news reports, we see it in the daily lives of lesser privileged people around us. I guess the motive of this book is to make people sensitive to the issue of poverty and the cycle of corruption and greed, but like I said its not that we Indians are not aware of the issue, its just that we turn a blind eye and do nothing about it. And in that respect I think this book will only serve as a speaking point for elitist who keep talking about the corruption and poverty but do nothing at all about it.

I agree. The unfortunate story of deprivation and poverty surrounding the luxury enjoyed by a few in India is an ubiquitous truth every Indian is aware of. What is uncommon is the way in which the narrative has been structured. It does not focus on the poverty or the deprivation. It gives respect to the individual. In a land overflooded with billions, an individual's story is often tramped over in favour of a collective, especially if the individual belongs to cattle class. But kudos to Boo's brilliance, her narrative has brought about the pathos of the individual into focus while describing a collective of people.
The end result being that the book is an effortless read. She has kept her and her perspective totally out of the narrative and concentrated only on the subjects of her narration. You get drawn into the book and before you know it, the book ends- as effortlessly as it began- leaving behind a few morsels of thought- admiration for the human spirit that sustains itself in the darkest of hours and respect for the almost 4 years of research and empathy that underlies the book.
A must read !!!

I picked up this book at the Mumbai airport bookstore and read the first couple of chapters at the platinum lounge waiting for a delayed flight. The irony began here.

The serpentine arrays of slum dwellings along the runway is usually distracting eyesore for most of us who fly in and out of Mumbai frequently. Maybe not anymore, if you choose to read this book.

Dissecting the lives, complex emotions, struggle for survival peppered with characters that entertain, anger and repel, the author has narrated a broader story -- the bigger picture of Mumbai - a city where the dark 'black' mingles seamlessly with the clean 'white'.

Set in a timeline which captures the global recession and its drilled down impact on the 'have nots', the narration incites respect, more than pity, hope more than compassion -- a hope the city thrives on, magically.. day after day....

Yes, this is not something the everyday Indian does not know about, Reading about the lives of the characters portrayed in the book, won`t excite you at all, won`t make you look up to them because you see this people everyday.

Reading first few pages for me was just flipping through pages, nothing new, yeah I know we do best in attracting news about our poverty. I am sure any non-Indian would read these accounts with two eyes pooped out.

The beauty of the book catches on you once you know all the characters and then the book moves narrating the events of their life.

That`s when it grabs you, Katherine`s superb journalistic language fueled from the eyes of a child, would make atrocious ordinary to you and ordinary as atrocious.

Read the book not for the topic but, for the style.