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Around the World in Books / India
What ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ Doesn’t Tell You About India
A Mumbai man falls into a judicial sinkhole after a neighbor frames him for a crime in a National Book Award winner
This is the 10th story in the “Around the World in Books” series that is reviewing 30 books from 30 countries in the first 30 days of March.
In the United States, the word corruption has only negative connotations. In India, Katherine Boo observes wryly, graft and fraud are among the few “genuine opportunities” open to slum dwellers who hope to rise above poverty.
Boo, a staff writer for the New Yorker, doesn’t endorse that bleak reality. But she suggests why it endures in Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House, 2012), a winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction. It’s a harrowing portrait of in desperate poverty in Annawadi, a slum of 3,000 people packed into 335 huts in the shadow of a sparkling blue-glass Hyatt near the Mumbai airport.
The residents of Annawadi can’t count on improving their lives through education. Many public schools are shams, run by teenagers or unqualified teachers who bribed officials to get their jobs. Without education…
