As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, "Tell me about the good work that you're doing and introduce me to the poor… — Katherine Boo Copy Share Image
“In places where government priorities and market imperatives create a world so capricious that to help a neighbor is to risk your ability to feed your family, and sometimes even your own liberty, the idea of the mutually supportive poor community is demolished. The poor blame one another for the choices of governments and markets, and we who are not… — Katherine Boo Copy Share
“The forces of justice had finally come to Annawadi. That the beneficiaries were horses was a source of bemusement to Sunil and the road… — Katherine Boo Copy Share Image
“For years, Asha had hoped that her daughter wouldn’t guess about the men. Now she wished she had raised Manju to be worldly enough… — Katherine Boo Copy Share Image
“What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the… — Katherine Boo Copy Share
I was spending a lot of time in Mumbai after I met my husband, who is Indian, and while parts of the city were… — Katherine Boo Copy Share Image
One thing that was very clear to me is that the young people in a place like Annawadi aren't tripping on caste the way… — Katherine Boo Copy Share Image
“Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. The pale sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and… — Katherine Boo Copy Share Image
There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who… — Katherine Boo Copy Share Image
“No onlooker asked, Why fix a house when the airport authority might demolish it? Almost everyone here improved his hut when he was able, in pursuit not just of better hygiene and protection from the monsoon but of protection from the airport authority. If the bulldozers came to flatten the slum, a decent hut was seen as a kind of… — Katherine Boo Copy Share
Everyone in Annawadi talks like this: 'Oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich'. It's vanity,… — Katherine Boo Copy Share Image
“Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter’s end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road. It was the walk of a boy on his way to school, taking his time, eating air. His trash sack… — Katherine Boo Copy Share
