Behind the Beautiful Forevers
I decided to read this book for a book report for my English class because it was on a list of suggestions. Nothing could have prepared me for the emotional shock it left me in. Behind the Beautiful Forevers was written by investigative journalist, Katherine Boo, who spent four years living in the slums of Mumbai, India to learn the stories of the people. It follows the stories of several different people, from older men, to middle-aged mothers, to young boys trying to avoid starvation on these merciless streets. It showed both the harm as well as the hope corruption meant to some families. This idea of luck and mere chance practically leads these people's lives, who are at the mercy of a failed legal system. Even those who are hard-working, honest, and kept to themselves could not avoid the evils of jealousy and malice of their neighbors.
The hardest part about reading this book is that you forget that this actually a true story. Your brain tries to protect you from the reality of it that you find yourself believing that these are fictional characters. But they're real. Every name, encounter, and quote is true and honest and is from a real life. It breaks your heart because you sit here thinking that it'll all end with no loose ends and a nice little bow on top, like most novels do. But this is not the work of Boo's imagination, it is a culmination of her observations and connections with the people of the slums. It's not the Disney ending we all wish for.
The thing that really left an impact on me was where the title came from. When I purchased the book, I assumed that the title was supposed to be some sort of metaphor for the content of the book, or it was just chosen because it sounded pretty. It's much more literal than that. When you realize that the title actually references the wall covered in ads for a tile company: Beautiful Forevers, dividing the slum from the remainder of society, it actually becomes more meaningful because you realize how ironically accurate it is. The slum is literally hidden from the view of people driving through the city, so as not to besmirch the image.
This book has honestly helped me see the world differently, something not many books accomplish. We sometimes think of "third world" as some hypothetical thing but it actually exists and people actually live there. And they're not charity cases who sit waiting on your spare dollar. They are ambitious and determined, weak and broken, corrupted and evil, and all the more human. I would recommend it in a heartbeat.
Favorite Quotes:
* "Still, from what he had observed in Annawadi, the fact that a boy knew about the gods didn't mean the gods would look after the boy (p. 148)"
* "He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai's dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals. For self-interested reasons, one of the ideals he wanted to have was a belief in the possibility of justice (p. 195)"
* "Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what that lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes... they destroyed themselves in the process (p. 211)"
