This week I finished:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo: Engaging, intimate, researched, poignant. It’s hard to imagine it was written by an American, not someone who lived there.

This book recounts a period in a Mumbai slum from the perspectives of a few of its residents. Their lives interact. The global economy affects them. Some things they can control, others they can’t. In some ways they’re savvy, in others they’re ignorant and helpless.

Their lives are different than those of anyone I know, yet they’re human. In my case, my dad lived in India for many years, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. He took us to working class neighborhoods he knew longtime friends in that might have qualified as slums here, but were more working class there. This book was about a lower-class neighborhood with only public toilets, polluted water, impermanent structures, corrupt government, and so on.

A friend recently visiting me in New York suggested that homeless people collecting recycling helped solve our pollution problems. These people’s stories help us see how connected we are to their subjugated lives. We’re not innocent.

I recommend this book.

• ← Other thoughts after knee surgery
• 774: Alden Wicker, part 1.5: Foraging Is Fun →