In the slums of Mumbai, India, in a half acre in the shadows of Mumbai International Airport, resides the city of Annawadi. A poor place, where children wander trash heaps in search of something valuable to sell so that they may have a mouthful of food. Yet, the city is a place of rising hope because of the affluence that is slowly spreading through India. Katherine Boo is a reporter, trying to spread awareness in her book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” that extreme poverty has not been eliminated and, as George Orwell would say, “[push] the world in a certain direction” so that attention is called to extreme poverty. To push her ideas, Boo uses appeal to emotion, comparisons, and details to assert her want of better living conditions for
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By including information about each person’s past, such as providing that Ashe grew up in a farming town, how the lack of rain affected the farmers, how some, “Ashamed and in debt[...] killed themselves” and how “the suicides had turned the region into international shorthand for the desperation of rural Indian property”(137). By doing this for a character such as Ashe (who may be as cruel and greedy based off of her actions to gain money as a slumlord in previous chapters), it shows that each character has a past that raised them to become who they were and attempts to garner sympathy from the audience so that the reader may not only sympathize with the characters, but reach an understanding that no person is truly ‘evil’, they are all doing what they can to survive. Boo also is vivid in her description of Abdul’s mistreatment while in police custody, detailing how while during “the beating[by the police] he was pulled back into sentience by the sound of his mother’s voice. She seemed to be just outside [...] “Don’t hurt him,” she was begging”(105). By doing this, Boo not only describes the horrors that Abdul faces, but how his mother is affected, begging for him to not be harmed. This brings forth empathy in the reader due to the bond that Abdul and his mother …show more content…
They serve as a quick, effective way to describe the extreme poverty that the occupants of Annawadi live in, such as Abdul, a teenage boy, living directly next to a trash shed. This was also where he works and he considers it “His storeroom- 120 square feet, piled high to a leaky roof with [...] Empty water and whiskey bottles, mildewed newspapers, used tampon applicators, wadded aluminum foil, umbrellas stripped to the ribs by monsoons, broken shoe laces, yellowed Q-tips, snarled cassette tape, torn plastic casings that once held imitation Barbies.”(xi). This effective use of details emphasizes the living conditions of Annawadians and how a boy, who is considered to have a somewhat stable economic existence, still works in a place that is physically close, yet still far removed from those living in Mumbai with relative luxury. This stresses poverties presence and how the occupants of Annawadi have become so used to poverty (or have grown up in it) that a trash shed or a crumbling brick wall is considered of high economic value. Boo also uses detail to describe each of the characters, such as Abdul who “Except for the child-eyes, black as keyholes, Abdul looked[...]like a broken old man” to emphasize how even someone as young as Abdul has matured far too quickly due to the lifestyle poverty has
By including information about each person’s past, such as providing that Ashe grew up in a farming town, how the lack of rain affected the farmers, how some, “Ashamed and in debt[...] killed themselves” and how “the suicides had turned the region into international shorthand for the desperation of rural Indian property”(137). By doing this for a character such as Ashe (who may be as cruel and greedy based off of her actions to gain money as a slumlord in previous chapters), it shows that each character has a past that raised them to become who they were and attempts to garner sympathy from the audience so that the reader may not only sympathize with the characters, but reach an understanding that no person is truly ‘evil’, they are all doing what they can to survive. Boo also is vivid in her description of Abdul’s mistreatment while in police custody, detailing how while during “the beating[by the police] he was pulled back into sentience by the sound of his mother’s voice. She seemed to be just outside [...] “Don’t hurt him,” she was begging”(105). By doing this, Boo not only describes the horrors that Abdul faces, but how his mother is affected, begging for him to not be harmed. This brings forth empathy in the reader due to the bond that Abdul and his mother …show more content…
They serve as a quick, effective way to describe the extreme poverty that the occupants of Annawadi live in, such as Abdul, a teenage boy, living directly next to a trash shed. This was also where he works and he considers it “His storeroom- 120 square feet, piled high to a leaky roof with [...] Empty water and whiskey bottles, mildewed newspapers, used tampon applicators, wadded aluminum foil, umbrellas stripped to the ribs by monsoons, broken shoe laces, yellowed Q-tips, snarled cassette tape, torn plastic casings that once held imitation Barbies.”(xi). This effective use of details emphasizes the living conditions of Annawadians and how a boy, who is considered to have a somewhat stable economic existence, still works in a place that is physically close, yet still far removed from those living in Mumbai with relative luxury. This stresses poverties presence and how the occupants of Annawadi have become so used to poverty (or have grown up in it) that a trash shed or a crumbling brick wall is considered of high economic value. Boo also uses detail to describe each of the characters, such as Abdul who “Except for the child-eyes, black as keyholes, Abdul looked[...]like a broken old man” to emphasize how even someone as young as Abdul has matured far too quickly due to the lifestyle poverty has