Katherine Boo's Behind The Beautiful Forevers

Could you imagine living on $1.25 per day? In India, this is normal. As a staff writer for The New Yorker, Katherine Boo, has spent the last twenty years reporting from poor communities all over the globe researching the diverse socioeconomic factors and how impoverished people are striving for a better future. After traveling to India, which holds one-third of the world’s poor, she not only fell in-love, but she felt it was her duty to learn more about the country. After interviewing various slumdwellers in Mumbai for over 3 years, learning about the economy, and the diverse culture that inhabits it, she decided to publish her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers in 2012. This astonishing, non-fiction novel takes you into the lives of some of Annawadi’s most hopeful and precarious individuals. It delves into each of their lives and the diversity each character holds within their slum. For instance, Abdul, a Muslim teenager runs his own garbage business to support his family, yet believes there is much more to life than just “counting scraps of metal and trash.” Asha, an intelligent woman, striving for middle class stature has used political corruption to avoid rural poverty that had once scarred her memory as a child. As for her own …show more content…
In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Annawadi is a makeshift slum near the Mumbai airport in the shadows of luxurious hotels, restaurants, and housing. This shows that although parts of India are considered to be in poverty, there are many other parts of the country that are flourishing rapidly. There is not only the “poor” but the “rich”. This was also portrayed in the film, Waste Land, as garbage sorters were constantly raving about how they found belongings from the rich homes that they could refurbish or recycle for larger