The Narrative of Poverty
When I was reading Katherine Boo's Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, about day-to-day life in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi, I couldn't stop thinking about how much the book had in common with one of my all-time favorites,Random Family, Adrian Nicole Leblanc's masterpiece about love and the drug trade in the South Bronx of the 19080s and 90s. So I wrote an essay for The Daily Beast about the two works--and about what Indian poverty and American poverty have in common.
...the affinities between the two books—set 7,800 miles and two decades apart—are astonishing. The way Annawadi’s savvier operators make a business out of government corruption, skimming off the top of generously funded anti-poverty efforts, is not dissimilar from the way the drug economy operates in American inner cities. “Corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained” for personal advancement in a Mumbai slum, Boo observes; several of the garbage-pickers she profiles accept their dirty lot in life only after giving up on dreams of a good education and clean, service-sector work in nearby luxury