As much as we endeavor to remind ourselves that we are lucky and that not everyone is blessed to live as we do, these are but empty admonishments, whispers on the wind of ignorance. For unless we actually experience true poverty, we cannot understand it: how it shapes our every action, how it limits our every dream, and how it empowers the cruel while crushing the hopeful. This isn't to say that we should not debate the best ways to solve poverty, nor is it to say that the rhetoric from all along the political spectrum is without merit, but it is to say that all the theories and the bluster mean very little when they are confronted by true poverty. Ms. Boo has published a nearly perfect work of journalism, full of revelations and tragedies, but it is perhaps the extent to which it cuts through all our nonsense with the white merciless light of unyielding truth that makes it an enduring work.
In the developing world, few countries are being as swiftly transformed as India. Memorably demonstrated in both its fiction and its skylines, this vast country of 1.2 billion souls is hurtling into the future at such velocity that no time, much less concern, is being given to the extent to which millions of its citizens are being left behind, abandoned at the roadside while the privileged race along the highway to prosperity. The speed of India's development has left no time for its institutions to grow with it, opening up gaping holes in the social fabric through which exploiters of political, cultural and economic forces can dive through, laying their greedy paws upon what they have not earned. This corruption only encourages others to do the same, leaving only fools to play by the rules.
So what of those who are left behind? What are their lives like? What are their prospects? Do they have opportunities to advance themselves , to elevate their families out of poverty? Or are they locked into lives of perpetual toil, Sisyphian souls who, every time they manage to climb out of the neglected underworld, are shoved right back down into that darkness by the moneyed classes who are ashamed to acknowledge their existence? To find out, Ms. Boo, an American journalist who has written extensively on poverty in the west, has trained her sights upon the underclasses of Mumbai, India's largest city. Over several years, through the compilation of thousands of interviews and hours of videotape, she has assembled a portrait of a shantytown that squats on soon-to-be developed land around Mumbai's international airport. Here, in the shadows of civilization's powerful floodlights, a society ekes out a daily existence on less than a few US dollars a day. Some beg, some steal, some work odd jobs in and around the airport, and others sort and sell trash, all in the hope that somehow, someday, they will encounter a moment of good fortune, an opportunity that, when seized, will deliver them and their families from a world smeared by jealousy, envy, hatred and rivalry.
Behind The Beautiful Forevers is investigative journalism at its finest. Though it stops short of the gonzo journalism practiced to such potent effect by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bowden, it does so barely. For, here, Ms. Boo has boldly chosen to tell her story through the eyes of her subjects, the impoverished with whom she has spent such time. It's difficult to imagine that anyone could do this without taking artistic license, or without abandoning objectivity altogether. And yet Ms. Boo's characterizations, of the hopeful and the vengeful, the aspiring and the despairing, are utterly convincing. Remarkably, the impact of these sweat-soaked portraits is bested by to the extent to which she captures the social hierarchies that exist within the slums. From the boss down to the one-legged prostitute, we watch Ms. Boo unpack our neat and tidy expectations of poverty, forcing us to regard, instead, a world that possesses its own rules, its own customs and its own rhythms.
Ms. Boo has done a masterful thing. For while she has pulled back the curtain on a colorful and tragic world, she has done so without proselytizing or hand-wringing. Instead, by eliminating herself as much as possible from the tale, in plugging us directly into the minds and the emotions of the forgotten, the abandoned, she has stripped away all the political biases and cultural barriers that stand between this book's readers and its subjects, allowing us to see them as they are, people like us, who want what we want, who yearn as we yearn, who dream as we dream. She does not call us to action, or submerge us in guilt. One merely gets the impression that Ms. Boo wants us to remember the downbelow people the next time we look away from them on the street, the next time we hide ourselves from them behind tinted glass.
Exquisite work... (5/5 Stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment