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Jun 26, 2012

"I don't try to fool myself that the stories of individuals are themselves arguments. I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives." --Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

"My husband is an Indian citizen, and since we met in 2001, I've been watching the landscape of his country transform as its economy grows. Some of the change is staggeringly obvious, like the skyscraping luxury condominiums with stirring views of other skyscraping luxury condominiums. But I couldn't quite make out what had and hadn't changed in historically poor communities. I generally find issues of poverty, opportunity, and global development to be over-theorized and under-reported. And it seemed to me that in India, as in the U.S., some of the experts most ready to describe how lower-income people are faring weren't spending much time with those people." Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo spent two years in a Mumbai slum seeking to understand the gritty realities and moral complexity of the urban poor. In this interview she describes the experience and what it revealed for her.