Behind the Beautiful Forevers Final Response

Poverty is all around us; it is inevitable that within a society there is both a high class and a low class.  However, what Katherine Boo did in her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers was something that went beyond the depth that I am accustomed to.  Within the pages of this book, one does not only learn the consequences of an impoverished (to put it lightly) society, but also is presented the opportunity to put faces with this crisis.

"Ashamed and in debt, some farmers killed themselves - an old story, one of the Marathi-movie staples.  But the movie reel was still playing.  In the new century, the government counted an average of a thousand farmer suicides a year in Vidarbha; activists counted many more.  Whatever the number, suicides had turned the region into international shorthand for the desperation of rural Indian poverty."  (second paragraph, page 137).

Throughout the book, death was regarded not as a serious, or even grievance-worthy issue, but more so as a part of life.  How ironic.  Still, this is probably the thing that struck me so deeply.  The lack of respect people, human bodies and souls, got can only be compared in my mind to those of the Holocaust.  Especially towards the end of the book, young boys called "thieves" steadily turned up dead, day after day.  But there was no sadness that spread throughout Annawadi.  Perhaps it was because the sadness had always been there; a depression that could not be lifted.  I felt that dejection, though.  From these pages it seemed tangible, as though I was there looking at the boy who showed up dead in the garden of flowers.

The concept of death is not universal; sadness does not always go hand in hand with the loss of a human life in some cultures.  This has been one of the harder to accept lessons for me, but I am glad to have shed light on the area of my misconceptions that were darkened and previously oblivious to me.  Katherine Boo has not just done something that shows a different culture, she has shown a different mindset of a people far away from me all together.  Although I walk away from this reading experience with, perhaps, more questions than answers, I am fortunate to even have the opportunity to question these topics (e.g., life, death, poverty, family and societal dynamics, etc.) in the first place.  This book will not be forgotten, but one I will recommend to anyone I can; it is truly beautiful, and a work of art in its own right.