![]() ![]() Annawadi, in the shadow of luxury hotels, is “a bitty slum popped up in the biggest city of a country that holds one third of the planet’s poor.” Built on swampy land abutting a sewage lake, it is home to a motley collection of marginal Indians desperate to make a living out of the detritus of the city’s economic boom. ![]() Katherine Boo, a New Yorker staff writer who won a Pulitzer Prize while working at The Washington Post, spent three years and four months (from November 2007 to March 2011) following the lives of some of Mumbai’s most deprived citizens, the dirt-poor residents of a squatter slum on the periphery of its international airport. ![]() But most of all, it is astonishing that it exists at all. It is astonishing on several levels: as a worm’s-eye view of the “undercity” of one of the world’s largest metropolises as an intensely reported, deeply felt account of the lives, hopes and fears of people traditionally excluded from literate narratives as a story that truly hasn’t been told before, at least not about India and not by a foreigner. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |