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

PRIAL: When I read I feel like the writer knows extremely well the situation the descriptions are excellents
I dont like the English level for me the words are complicated the understanding
I recommend this boon to people who want a wink about Mumbai
I like the scenery description

India on May 29, 2023

Amazon Customer: <b>Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity</b> was a simply wonderful work of narrative non fiction and I am not the least bit surprised it won numerous awards. Author Katherine Boo is a Pulitzer Prize winner and it was evident she knew this topic intimately. Her Author's Note explains the amount of research undertaken in writing this book. Over the course of several years, from 2007 through until 2011, Katherine Boo (with the assistance of various translators) worked tirelessly gathering information in an effort to understand what it was to live in the Annawadi slums. She gathered photo's, audio and videotape footage, interviewed residents, obtained official records, listened and observed. In so doing she was able to capture the people of the slums incredibly well. Almost every sentence contained a nugget of information that pulled me up short causing me to mull over the meaning and to wonder at how these people survived their lives.

Of course, as per the title, very many did not survive.

As I was reading I struggled to reconcile the lives of these Indian slum dwellers against the lives of the Indian people I've worked...

Australia on Apr 01, 2021

P. G. Harris: Behind the Beautiful Forevers is the story of life in Annawadi, a slum situated close to Mumbai Airport. In the prologue we meet Abdul Hussain, a teenager who scratches a living for his family by sorting scrap scavenged by his neighbours and selling it for recycling. At the start of the book, he is hiding from the police, fearful of being arrested for complicity in the attempted suicide of one of his neighbours.

As the story opens out, we are introduced to the wider population of the slum, Asha, an unscrupulous fixer, desperate to climb out of the degradation and prepared to do just about anything to escape, her beautiful daughter Manju, who hopes that education will enable her to escape from an arranged marriage, Sunil, a young but resourceful scavenger, the one legged sexually voracious Fatima.

The story spreads both backwards and forwards from Adbul’s flight from the law. It provides an account of how he came to be hiding under a pile of rubbish, and also the story of what came after.

At its heart this book provides a fundamentally horrific picture of modern India. It is a society divided between extreme wealth and extreme poverty. It is a world of...

United Kingdom on Jun 13, 2017

S Litton: I had two problems with this otherwise excellent book. Firstly was the lack of context and a wider view. The focus is very narrow (claustrophobic, even), with no attempt to explain the larger forces at work which keep so many people trapped in grinding poverty. However, I understand that Boo wanted to write something from the slum-dwellers' point of view, rather than a sociological analysis, so I guess I can't really criticise her for not writing a different book.
Secondly, her methodology and style of writing caused me some problems. It's written very much like a novel, including direct speech and passages describing the characters' inner thoughts and feelings. I understand that Boo and her translators spent a lot of time in these slums, became close to the people, and gained their trust to the extent that they could almost forget that they were there, watching and listening and taking notes the whole time. And still, I can't help feeling that there must be layers of interpretation and the presence of the observer must have had some effect, however small. I was conscious of this throughout most of the book and found it quite distracting. On the other hand it raises interesting...

United Kingdom on Nov 16, 2016

Michael J. Connelly: In the 1950s, the comedian Eddie Lawrence invented the Old Philosopher, a character who recited imagined calamities and asked, “Is that what’s bothering you, Bunkie?” As I read about the misfortunes chronicled in "Behind the Beautiful Forevers," I found myself thinking, Is that what’s bothering you, Pallavi? Except these calamities are all too real.

Katherine Boo writes very well. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and she’s won a MacArthur “Genius” grant. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is her anthropological-by-anecdote study of Annawadi, an “undercity” – a temporary colony in makeshift shelters – of 3,000 squatters under the flight path of the Mumbai airport. It sits in the shadows of the “Glimmerglass Hyatt” and other luxury hotels, symbols of India’s newfound prosperity.

As Boo explains in an author’s note, "Every country has its myths, and one that successful Indians liked to indulge was a romance of instability and adaptation – the idea that India's rapid rise derived in part from the chaotic unpredictability of daily life." And nowhere is daily life more chaotic or...

United States on Nov 30, 2013

J. Lavoie: The more that these make-shift living arrangments for the poor in third world countries are exposed, hopefully, the more 'future leaders' will do something for these poverty stricken people who have no choice but to live in these slum shacks without a promise or a dream. These unfit home-built shelters with no amenities (but what is found or purchased in the vacinity) are called squallers. There are too many of these unfit city shelters existing in our world today.

Even though India is now a democratic society, still their caste system remain in place: People at the bottom (eco/socio) are the poorest of the poor, and thus are treated as degenerates and nobodys. These people have no future due to the status they are born into. They are not protected by their government for modification standards regarding the all-around unhealthy home setting. By this I mean that these poverty stricken people living on top of their seweage have no say in the non-environmental laws which could change the clean up of the rampid sewage streets, their polluted rivers and streams, as well as the gargage dumps that welcome them to forage for material assets to be sold, to becoming a possible...

United States on Aug 23, 2013

Barry Bootle: I must confess I picked this book up with some trepidation. The subtitle - "Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum" - and the cover (of my copy), a young boy sprinting up steps into bright sunlight, made me think it might be another of those. You know, those. The post-Slumdog reportage. "Yes, conditions in Indian slums are appalling. But wait! Look at the way the children run and play! The sights, the smells! The way they can still laugh, in the face of such hardship. The way they just get on with the life they've got!" (What else are they supposed to do?) "So life-affirming!"
The hope of it all!
"Slumdog" is a good film. And a lot of the reportage is also good, and if it's not it's generally well-meaning. But I find it all a bit discomfiting. It's human to believe in hope, but it seems to me that, as Westerners, focussing on the small hopes that slum-dwellers have might be a convenient way of deflecting our own guilt that people have to live this way. (And the likes of Amitabh Bachchan castigating "Slumdog" for focussing on a small part of Indian life might be an Indian way of doing the same thing).
I thought this book might be more of the same. It wasn't.
Boo is no...

United Kingdom on Mar 22, 2013