Presentation Date:
This session, focusing on Behind the Beautiful Forevers, was hosted on March 31st, 2014 by the Global Health Institute and South Asia Institute. It featured South Asian Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, Shankar Ramaswami.
View a recording of the session here: http://cmes.adobeconnect.com/p8q3y1ftta5/
Suggested for further reading:
Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries (2013) by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya
An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (2013) by Jean Drèze & Amartya Sen
Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India (2012) by Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari
About the book:
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”
But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.
With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.