Annawadi or The Dream of Another Life

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Annawadi or The Dream of Another Life (English original title: Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity ) is a non-fiction book by the Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist Katherine Boo . She received a number of awards for her first book, including the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize .

Boo, who previously wrote mostly about the impoverished population in the United States, describes in her non-fiction book the daily struggle for survival of the inhabitants of a small slum in Mumbai , India , which bears the name Annawadi. She focuses on the life situation of a few people, including a garbage collector, a female "slum lord" and a college student. Boo is a white American and lived in Mumbai for several years with her husband, an Indian political scientist.

content

Annawadi is a slum that arose on land belonging to Mumbai Airport . In 1991, migrant workers who were employed nearby during the construction of the airport settled there. They settled in a swampy area which, due to the nature of the soil, should not be developed for the airport. The area was densely populated with simple huts very quickly. Most of the residents had recently come to Mumbai from other regions of India and Pakistan; accordingly, people of very different ethnicities and languages ​​lived here. The English title Behind the Beautiful Forevers derives from the large billboards along the road to the airport, with the tagline Beautiful forever (dt .: Forever beautifully advertised and) for Italian bath tiles at the same time hiding the slum before the eyes of the passengers of the airport .

Boo interviewed the residents of this slum over a period of three years. Poverty, hunger, disease, dirt, floods as a result of monsoon rains, ethnic conflicts, corruption, violence, the disputes that arise from the close coexistence and the fear that the airport administration will have the slum destroyed by bulldozers are those constant themes of the people living in this slum. Boo focuses on people like Sunil, a retarded orphan boy in her book; Abdul Husain, who, like his father, is a garbage collector; Fatima, who has lost a leg and dreams of a different life; Manju, who is determined to be the first resident of the slum to graduate from college, and her mother Asha, who tries to establish herself as a “slum lord” because it gives her access to power, money and influence, but also part of it the corruption that dominates the lives of slum dwellers. The events described by Katherine Boo center on the aftermath of Fatima's self-immolation, which before her death falsely accused Abdul, his sister, and his father of the crime. This leads to the arrest of all three people by corrupt police who are not interested in investigating what happened. To understand the processes surrounding the Fatima self-immolation, she interviewed no fewer than 168 people and studied the police, hospital, morgue and court records.

background

The Annawadi slum is not far from the neat and luxurious atmosphere of Mumbai Airport.

Katherine Boo decided to take a closer look at Annawadi because the slum, consisting of only 350 huts, was small and clearly laid out. It is located on Airport Road, which leads to the airport, and confronts the "new India" with the old in an extreme way. Five luxury hotels are located in the immediate vicinity of the slum, only an avenue lined with coconut palms separates the slum from the entrance of the airport's international terminal.

In her epilogue, Boo explains that she quickly became impatient with the typical depictions of the poorest sections of the population in India, who repeatedly put emaciated children in the foreground. She was much more interested in the development opportunities India offered these children. Whose skills would prevail in the face of Indian social and economic policy and whose skills would be neglected? What would mean that these emaciated children would have a future with less poverty? But she also investigated the question of why the devastating poverty of so large parts of the Indian population, which is faced with a small, very wealthy class, does not lead to major conflicts in Indian society. In the epilogue Boo writes:

“Some people consider it a 'moral' problem that wealth and poverty coexist so closely. On the other hand, I find it fascinating how seldom this coexistence is perceived as a 'practical' problem. After all, there are more poor people than rich people in the mumbai of this world. Why do areas like Airport Road, where slums are practically in close contact with luxury hotels, don't look like civil war scenarios in video games? Why don't our unequal societies implode much more often? "

However, Boo also comes to the conclusion that it is the lack of solidarity among the slum dwellers that makes breaking out of these living conditions so difficult:

“Impotent people blamed other impotent people for everything they lacked. Sometimes they got themselves out of the way, like Fatima. If they were lucky, like Asha, they improved their own lot by ruining other poor chances. "

reception

In a review for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung Annawadi or The Dream of Another Life, Bernard Imhasly named a book that changed the reader's view of the world. Hans Durrer also shares this judgment in his review for Buchkritik.at. Imhasly further writes that Boo empathizes with these people and believes in reconstructing feelings, reactions and events. Boo does not do this plaintively, but in an unsentimental and yet lyrical prose that creates distance and compassion. She succeeds because she worked in this slum for so long that she was no longer noticed. However, he criticizes the unsuccessful and in part incorrect translation and the unfortunate German title. In a review for Deutschlandradio, Sabrina Matthay also acknowledged the book's high quality and criticized the German translation - the crude colloquial language with which the dialogues of the Annawadians were given an emphatically proletarian touch is a feature of the German translation alone. The author had waived this in the original. Since Matthay rates the book as a brilliant report, she recommends reading the American original. The review in the taz was also positive, which certifies that the book has a lasting effect on the reader:

“The stories of Ahmed and Sunil, the two young garbage collectors whose fate follows Katerine Boo, will stay with you. The book helps to tell the stories of globalization and the development of the world not with general political terms, but more precisely in concrete terms. "

Awards

expenditure

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Behind the Beautiful Forevers . Random House . Retrieved February 2, 2014.
  2. ^ A b Leslie Kaufman: Novel About Racial Injustice Wins National Book Award . In: New York Times . November 14, 2012. Retrieved November 15, 2012.
  3. ↑ Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, p. 252
  4. ↑ Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, p. 247.
  5. ↑ Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, p. 249.
  6. ↑ Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, p. 248. The original quote is: Some people consider such juxtapositions of wealth and poverty a moral problem. What fascinates me is why they're not more of a practical one. After all, there are more poor people than rich people in the world's Mumbais. Why don't places like Airport Road, whith their cheek-by-jowl slums and luxury hotels, look like the insurrectionist video game Metal Slug 3? Why don't more of our unequal societies implode?
  7. ↑ Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, p. 237. The original quote is: ... powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.
  8. ↑ Book review by Hans Dürrer on Buchkritik.at , accessed on March 28, 2014
  9. ↑ Bernhard Imhasly's book review , accessed on March 26, 2014
  10. ^ Book review on Deutschlandradio , accessed on March 27, 2014
  11. ^ Book review taz , accessed on March 26, 2014
  12. ^ John Williams: National Book Critics Circle Names 2012 Award Finalists . In: New York Times . January 14, 2012. Retrieved January 15, 2013.
  13. ^ Alison Flood: Six books to 'change our view of the world' on shortlist for non-fiction prize . In: The Guardian , October 5, 2012. Retrieved October 5, 2012. 
  14. ^ Alison Flood: Guardian First Book award 2012 shortlist announced . In: The Guardian . November 8, 2012. Retrieved November 8, 2012.
  15. ^ The 10 Best Books of 2012 . In: The New York Times , November 30, 2012. 
  16. ↑ David Daley: The What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 . In: salon.com . December 23, 2012. Retrieved December 24, 2012.
  17. ^ Announcing the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize winners . In: LA Times . April 19, 2013. Retrieved April 21, 2013.
  18. ↑ Carolyn Kellogg: Jacket Copy: PEN announces winners of its 2013 awards . In: Los Angeles Times . August 14, 2013. Retrieved August 14, 2013.