Summary Of Behind The Beautiful Forevers

The Scavengers for Opportunity ; Hardships in the Globalized Undercity India, the second most populated country in the world with roughly 1.3 billion people, is facing a crisis. According to World Bank in 2011, India housed about 22% of the world’s poorest people living in the country alone. Katherine Boo’s book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers ; Life, Death, And Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, tells a non-fictional story about the endeavor of living in the slums near India’s largest city Mumbai. The book takes in the narratives of the impoverished citizens of Annawadi and display the condition of undercity and its people as a destitute wasteland full of competition due to globalization affecting the economy and people social class and the clash

With the influx of these migrant workers, jobs in Annawadi and Mumbai is scarce and created competition between people trying to escape the claws of poverty. Behind the Beautiful Forevers introduced the narrative of Asha in chapter 2, a woman in the slums, competing with others trying to become the next slum lord. She met an old friend, Mr. Kamble, who was in dire need of a heart valve in order to live and to continue working to provide for his family. She knew all the troubles of the fierce competition in Annawadi can make, “For every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge” (Boo, 24). There is a trade off for every citizens in Annawadi, and with Mr. Kamble unable to work because of his heart problem, he was the one person who was in the catastrophic plunge because he lost his job due to his heart condition and two other people most likely took his job because of it. The scarce job situation happened because the diffusion of globalization in India, causing a greater social disparity in

With the booming economy, the city of Mumbai begin to grow even larger, and in the Behind the Beautiful Forevers first introduced the narrative of Abdul, a teenager in the slum who work as a garbage trader, who felt the pressure of globalization have done to the citizens of Annawadi. Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy, authors of Conflicting Humanities, wrote about the events in Behind the Beautiful Forevers are linked to the global expansion of capitalism and urges a re-examination of its context of, “Class mobility and social circulation, [and] the redistribution of opportunity [and] wealth” (Braidotti and Gilroy, 62). Braidotti and Gilroy reveal the effect of globalization and how it is linked to Boo’s book, and in Boo’s first chapter, Abdul believes that his job as a simple garbage trade will provide him with some opportunities. He believes that if he save up money from his job of buying reusable trash and selling them to companies. He will be able to move out of his poverty-stricken life in Annawadi and become an middle class citizens. This supports the idea of class mobility mentioned by Braidotti and Gilroy, but poverty in the slums proves a challenge and it intensifies the cultural, ethnic, and religious contentions between the citizens of the