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Katherine Boo on Behind the Beautiful Forevers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yesu8go-ryg

===== .. hope some here know of Katherine Boo .. i was introduced to her yesterday by a fascinating radio
interview which unfortunately i can't find a transcript of .. these offer just a bit of a remarkable work ..

Katherine Boo interview

Katherine Boo reveals how she got to know the inhabitants of the


Katherine Boo with children from the Annawadi slum Photo: Katherine Boo

By Jessamy Calkin 9:00AM BST 01 Jun 2012

Katherine Boo began to research Behind the Beautiful Forevers .. http://www.books.telegraph.co.uk/ .. in November 2007, spending time in six different slums before she fixed on Annawadi. In Mumbai, despite recent spectacular economic growth, more than half of the citizens still live in makeshift housing. Boo hated the sensationalist and sentimental way that Indian slums were portrayed, and was more interested in the residents’ attempts to extract themselves from poverty and make the most of their opportunities. She wanted to show how slums such as Annawadi work as functioning, vibrant communities.

The waste land: extract from Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Boo (pictured) was there for long stretches at a time over four years. Initially residents were suspicious of her motives – some thought she was coming to steal their children or to convert people to Christianity, but they gradually got used to her presence. ‘They thought what I was doing was boring and foolish, and there were times when they felt sorry for me because they thought, who’s going to want to read this?’ After an article about the slum that she wrote for the New Yorker was reprinted in a local newspaper, they began to take her seriously and realised that she got their lives, she understood, and she was accurate, and funny too. .. [ insert YT, as the embed ]

[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGNEkdGy9NI ]

Annawadi is a ‘sumpy plug of slum’, a garish, seething, stinking, frantic wriggling community of 3,000 people, flanked by Mumbai airport and several luxury hotels, and fenced off by hoardings advertising Italian­ate floor tiles decorated with the slogan ‘Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever…’ Boo’s descriptions of life within are almost Dickensian, as are her characters: the former slumlord who paints his horses with stripes to look like zebras which he hires out for children’s parties; Kalu, the little thief with a legendary pain threshold whose skills at mimicry keep everyone entertained; Sunil, a touching scavenger who pretends that he goes to school. And there is Asha, the aspiring slumlord, uneducated, ambitious, unscrupulous but somehow very appealing, and her gorgeous daughter Manju, the only college graduate in Annawadi.

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After several months of collecting material, a plot presented itself when Abdul and his family were accused of setting fire to Fatima, their one-legged neighbour, and the book grew up around it. In the narrative Boo is omniscient, recounting the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists with nuance and alacrity. The language of the book is beautiful, and she reconstructs scenes through endless interviews with her subjects, to the point where (she says in the author’s note) ‘Abdul asks, are you dim-witted, Katherine? I told you already three times and you put it in your computer.’ Fatima’s immolation, for example, was based on interviews with 168 people as well as hospital records.

Coming from an early background of working for small publications that ‘would have gone under if there had been any kind of libel case’, not to mention the famously stringent New Yorker, Boo was used to rigorous fact-checking. She documented everything with notes, audiotapes, photographs and video. She made avid and meticulous use of public records. Many of the scenes she witnessed herself, going out on scavenging and thieving expeditions and raids with teenage boys, accidentally falling in the sewage lake, climbing over fences, though often she couldn’t keep up and had to hand over her camera – several of the scavengers proved to be excellent cameramen.

Boo has great respect for Abdul, whose story is the pivot of the book. ‘I liked him enormously. His own family didn’t appreciate him – they loved his little brother Mirchi – but it was Abdul who was supporting a family of 11; he was completely invested in making sure that his younger brothers and sisters didn’t have to work.’

At first Abdul was hard to draw out. He spent all day sorting trash and was completely unused to talking about his feelings. ‘I remember one of the first times he said something quite extraordinary and my translator and I both looked at each other: it was clear that here was a really smart kid with an interesting way of looking at the world.’ Abdul is stoic and philosophical. Reflecting on the horror that some people dwell in, he says, ‘Even the person who lives like a dog still has some kind of life. Once my mother was beating me, and that thought came to me. I said, “If what is happening now, you beating me, is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.”’

In some ways Boo is like Abdul: hard-working, thorough and unassuming, sifting endlessly through four years of tapes and 6,000 hours of film to bring her book to life. She hates attention, and she loathes giving interviews; she became a writer because she wanted the writing to speak for itself. She is married to Sunil Khilnani, a professor of politics who runs the India Institute at King’s College London. In 2000, while working at the Washington Post, Boo won a Pulitzer Prize for her investigative reporting of poverty in America. She had always wanted to write a book like this but having been dogged by ill health (she has suffered rheumatoid arthritis since her early teens as well as auto-immune disorders) she worried how she would fare in the humid and notoriously unhealthy atmosphere of the slums. One night, in her flat in Washington, DC, she tripped over a dictionary and lay there helplessly for hours with a punctured lung and three broken ribs. ‘Having proved myself ill-suited to safe cohabitation with an unabridged dictionary,’ she writes, ‘I had little to lose by pursuing my interests in another quarter – a place beyond my so-called expertise.’

As it turned out, both she and her translators (she had three; the longest serving was Unnati Tripathi) were dogged by constant fevers and infection. But Boo’s fortitude had been strengthened by years of illness, even though by the time they finished, she says, she and Tripathi weighed less than 100lb.

She had run-ins with the police, at one point having to leave Annawadi for a time, but managed to complete the book without paying any bribes. Nor did she give money to the people she was writing about. ‘Early on some kids would ask for 10 rupees but I would explain to them that with the way I work you can’t pay for stories, it would be a violation of ethics. And people got that, and would explain it to others. It wasn’t a big issue, though I had thought it might be.’

It must have been hard not to intervene. There is warmth and empathy, but the slum is also a place made callous by poverty: the autorickshaw drivers who wouldn’t take the burnt Fatima to hospital because they didn’t want their seat covers messed up; the beggar who was hit by a car and slowly died of his injuries by the side of the road. Boo felt compelled to intervene on one occasion, when a blind woman and her children were being violently evicted from their house on Asha’s orders. ‘I mean, look at me, I couldn’t fight these men but I could go in and say, “This is wrong, and I’m filming it,” which defused the situation.’

The crucial question was when to stop. Boo had been undone, she said, by the unrelated deaths of three of the teenage protagonists while she was there. ‘After that I picked up a newspaper and read about some horses falling off an overpass and I knew they belonged to the ex-slumlord [of Annawadi]. Comparing the outrage over the horses with the absolute indifference to the children – I thought, somewhere near here is where my book ends. And it was never going to be a book that ended with the trial, or Abdul’s case being resolved, it was just going to go on for ever. Like life.’

‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’ (Portobello Books, £14.99) is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1515)

The waste land: extract from Behind the Beautiful Forevers

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9295694/Katherine-Boo-interview.html

=====

An Outsider Gives Voice to Slumdogs

Katherine Boo on Her Book ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers’

By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: February 8, 2012

Unlike many journalists Katherine Boo aspires to invisibility. She hates publicity and talks about herself with about as much ease as someone trying to wriggle from a thicket — stopping, pausing, retracing her sentences and looking for a better way out. In her new book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” the word “I” doesn’t appear until an author’s note on page 247, and by then it’s a little jarring.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/02/09/arts/BOO/BOO-articleInline.jpg
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Katherine Boo

One result is that “Beautiful Forevers,” .. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/books/katherine-boos-first-book-behind-the-beautiful-forevers.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=katherine%20boo&st=cse .. a nonfiction account of the 3,000 or so people who live in Annawadi .. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/02/behind-the-beautiful-forevers-surviving-and-living-in-the-slums-of-mumbai.html , a “sumpy plug of slum” on the outskirts of the Mumbai airport, reads almost like a novel: a true-life version of “Slumdog Millionaire” .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIzbwV7on6Q .. without the Bollywood ending. The characters include various thieves and Dumpster divers; the neighborhood ward boss and her prized daughter, who is earning a college degree by rote, memorizing word for word the plots of “Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Way of the World”; and a man who makes a living of sorts by racing a carriage drawn by horses painted to look like zebras. The plot turns on a seemingly petty feud in which a disgruntled woman sets herself on fire and then blames her neighbors, two of whom wind up jail, where they are brazenly extorted by a legal system that thrives on corruption.

Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of The New York Times who has written extensively about India, wrote in an e-mail message that “Beautiful Forevers” is “the best piece of reporting to come out of India in a half century at least” and compared it to another groundbreaking book about poverty, George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier .. http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/ .”

In her early visits to Annawadi, which began in 2007, Ms. Boo, who is small, blond and delicate looking and knew none of the half dozen or so languages spoken there, was anything but invisible. There are, or used to be, two main landmarks in the slum: a concrete wall with ads for Italian tiles (“Beautiful Forever”) that give the book its title, and a foul-smelling sewage lake: a junk-rimmed pool of excrement, monsoon runoff and petrochemicals. While videotaping one day, Ms. Boo fell in, and when she came out her feet were blue.

“At first it was a circus act,” she said in New York the other day. “It was, ‘Look at that crazy white woman!’ ” But she spent so much time in Annawadi, reporting almost daily for four- or five-month stints over a span of four years, that eventually she became a fixture and was taken for granted. “The people got bored with me,” she said, “and they started laughing when others thought I was interesting. I think some of them even felt sorry for me.”

In 2009 Ms. Boo wrote an article for The New Yorker .. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_boo , where she has been a staff writer since 2003, describing the Mumbai premiere of “Slumdog Millionaire” and contrasting its lavishness with the lives of some of her slum dwellers. The story was picked up and translated by a Marathi-language newspaper. This got her in hot water with the local police, who were irritated by her suggestion that they had covered up a murder of a young slum dweller, but also gave her credibility with the Annawadians. “They saw that I was really doing what I said I was doing,” she said. “They saw that I even got the jokes.”

Ms. Boo was introduced to Mumbai by her husband, Sunil Khilnani, a former Johns Hopkins University professor who spends part of every year there and thought she could write about India in a way less condescending than many Westerners. Initially she was hesitant: there was the language barrier, and also her shaky health.

Since her late teens Ms. Boo, who is now 47, has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and several related immunological disorders. She walks a little slowly and sometimes has trouble with her eyes. Her fingers are gnarled and bent. That she is still able to type is owing in large part to a 2002 MacArthur grant, which helped pay for surgery on her right hand.

For someone in her condition the best treatment is drugs that suppress the immune system, and these do not make such a person an ideal candidate for spending time in a slum where tuberculosis is practically epidemic. But one night Ms. Boo tripped over an unabridged dictionary in her own apartment, puncturing a lung and breaking three ribs, and decided home wasn’t much safer. “I thought if I don’t work, I’m risking my mental health,” she said.

For as long as she has been a writer, Ms. Boo has only wanted to write about the poor and the disadvantaged. In 2000, while at The Washington Post, she won a Pulitzer Prize for a series about the mistreatment of the mentally retarded in the Washington area. “I think I grew up with a healthy respect for volatility, all the things you can’t control,” she said. “And I became aware of the ways in which people who write about the disadvantaged often underestimate its psychological contours, the uncertainty — economic or whatever.”

Ms. Boo is herself both a late bloomer and a prodigy. She grew up in and around Washington, where her parents, both Minnesotans, moved when her father became an aide to Representative Eugene McCarthy. (The family name is Swedish, an Americanized version of Bö.) After high school, by her own account a “confused late adolescent,” Ms. Boo took the civil service exam and became a clerk typist for the General Services Administration. When she discovered she was ill, she quit and stayed at home for a while, just reading, and then went to night school while typing again, this time for the Federal Election Commission.

Ms. Boo graduated from Barnard in the late ’80s, still typing — for The Columbia Daily Spectator, for which she wrote editorials — and was hired by Jack Shafer, then the editor of the Washington City Paper. Mr. Shafer, now a columnist for Reuters, said recently that he was impressed less by her writing than by her voluminous reading and her ability to think on her feet, and was amazed by how accomplished her first article was. “She had the soul of a poet but the arm strength of an investigative reporter,” he recalled.

Soon afterward he made Ms. Boo his No. 2, responsible not just for writing but also for editing the work of others, and from there she moved up the ladder to The Washington Monthly and then The Post, where she became known for the way she combined investigative digging, on-the-street reporting and brilliant writing. But she was never comfortable with interviewing official sources, she said, and is still proud she has never had lunch with one.

Another thing that makes her uncomfortable is policy wonkery, and by design “Beautiful Forevers,” a book as depressing as it is memorable, has no summing-up chapter full of recommendations. “I respect the division of labor,” she said. “My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.” She added: “Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 9, 2012, on page C1
of the New York edition with the headline: An Outsider Gives Voice To Slumdogs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/09/books/katherine-boo-on-her-book-behind-the-beautiful-forevers.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&;