Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity - Katherine Boo [110]
The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe. In my reporting, I am continually struck by the ethical imaginations of young people, even those in circumstances so desperate that selfishness would be an asset. Children have little power to act on those imaginations, and by the time they grow up, they may have become the adults who keep walking as a bleeding waste-picker slowly dies on the roadside, who turn away when a burned woman writhes, whose first reaction when a vibrant teenager drinks rat poison is a shrug. How does that happen? How—to use Abdul’s formulation—do children intent on being ice become water? A cliché about India holds that the loss of life matters less here than in other countries, because of the Hindu faith in reincarnation, and because of the vast scale of the population. In my reporting, I found that young people felt the loss of life acutely. What appeared to be indifference to other people’s suffering had little to do with reincarnation, and less to do with being born brutish. I believe it had a good deal to do with conditions that had sabotaged their innate capacity for moral action.
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 poor are ready to blame the poor just as harshly.
It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be—all those invisible individuals who every day find themselves faced with dilemmas not unlike the one Abdul confronted, stone slab in hand, one July afternoon when his life exploded. If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?
My deepest debt is to the residents of Annawadi. I am also grateful for the support and insight of the following people and institutions:
Bharati Chaturvedi, Vijaya Chauhan, Benjamin Dreyer, Naresh Fernandes, Severina Fernandes, Mahendra Gamare, Shailesh Gandhi, Matthew Geczy, David Jackson, James John, Kumar Ketkar, Cressida Leyshon, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Nandini Mehta, Sharmistha Mohanty, Sumit Mullick, Shobha Murthy, Kiran Nagarkar, Alka Bhagvaan Nikale, Brijesh Patel, Gautam Patel, Jeet Narayan Patel, Rajendra Prasad Patel, Anna Pitoniak, Vikram Raghavan, Lindsey Schwoeri, Mike and Mark Seifert, Altamas Shaikh, Gary Smith and the American Academy in Berlin, Hilda Suarez, Arvind Subramanian, M. Jordan Tierney, and Madhulika and Yogendra Yadav.
Binky Urban and Kate Medina for believing, against considerable evidence, that I could do this.
David Remnick for his commitment to work that is slow to do and not necessarily appealing to advertisers.
David Finkel and Anne Hull for their sustaining counsel at every stage of this project.
Unnati Tripathi for her genius and bravery.
Mrinmayee Ranade for her teaching, her optimism, and her perceptiveness about the domestic lives of ordinary women.
Luca Giuliani, Joachim Nettelbeck, and the staff of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for providing the haven where I recovered from the reporting and wrote the first draft of