When I mentioned this book to a friend, she asked me, in all genuineness, why I was reading a book about India and the Mumbai slums written by a foreigner? There’s probably a bit of truth to that. Why did I want to read about stories I’ve heard and read in the papers, just ones with different names and locations? In all probability, it was written by someone who’s baffled by the notion of it and probably went on to write it in terms of ‘shock and awe’

Oh how wrong I was.

If I’m being honest, I am just as much of a foreigner as Katherine Boo is when it comes to the slums of Mumbai and other poverty ridden settlements in the country. The only difference is that I’ve seen enough of it from a young age meaning that I too eventually fell into the nation-wide pattern of feeling bad and then nothing else.

I don’t know how it feels to live in such a slum. I’m here, in this country that houses these lives and these tragedies, sitting at home writing on my laptop about a book that costs more than the monthly wages of an Annawadi resident. But If I’m truly being honest, guilt does not bode well for you in this country.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a nonfiction book by Katherine Boo, a staff writer for the New Yorker. Boo is a Pulitzer Prize recipient for Public Service, has won National Magazine awards and was also awarded the MacArthur Genius grant. And it shows. The book focuses on the lives of a number of residents in a slum called ‘Annawadi’ situated near the Sahar Airport Road in Mumbai. This juxtaposition of the ‘Old India and New India’, as Boo calls it, is kind of a foreshadowing of how the slum dwellers are always on the threshold of being alleviated from their plight but somehow cruelly pulled pack by the hands of misfortune. Boo offers a well-researched back story of the slum and a running commentary on the lives that inhabit those walls or rather inhabit its squalor. We’re invited into the ruddy shacks of young garbage collector Abdul, into the streets that the thief Kalu wanders about searching for any means of food and money, into an entire burning pot of daily uncertainty that resides behind a concrete wall; one that’s lined with advertisements for Italianate floor tiles which read ‘Beautiful Forever.’ I’m not going any further into the story because I don’t even know where to begin and where it would end. But I do give this book 5 stars for its unsentimental yet poignant portrayal of ‘Life, death and hope in a Mumbai Undercity.’

On a side note: One thing I did notice, after reading a couple of reviews of the book on the GR page, was how a lot of people registered shock and maybe that is where I ,as an Indian ,differ. I am not shocked. In fact, I don’t even know what I am going to do with all this information. I probably won’t do anything else other than donate clothes and money like most people do and it probably won’t do any tangible good.
We’ve grown accustomed to this,this apathy and this repressed guilt for having enough. We cautiously drop a rupee into the hands of the old lady with the walking stick who's making the rounds of the bus stop, we sometimes refuse to pay when the helpless person doesn’t seem so helpless heeding our parent's warning to be wary of people who are simply lazy and not unable to work, we’re told stories as kids of ‘Kokachis’ and watered down versions of pimps who’ll steal us away if we’re not careful.By then, We’ve already created a dividing line between us and them, raising our shields so as to never fall in to that horrid space.
Things don’t shock us anymore. And when they do, like this or this , more often than not, these cases do nothing but raise the level of horrors that is now required to shock us the next time.