Themes in behind the beautiful forevers

Luther8

Analytical Research Paper: Behind the Beautiful Forever’s.

Joe Smith

Geography

11/1/2017

Analytical Research Paper: Behind the Beautiful Forever’s.

Introduction.

Geographical differences can be viewed as the reason diversity exists in the world today. Through differences which exist in terms of geography, different cultural beliefs have been developed. It is possible to find totally contradicting beliefs, behaviors and economic activities in people and if these people were placed together, they might have the same ideologies. The same way geography influenced the behaviors of people is exactly how it influenced the stories told by them.

There is a number popular of novels, books, and fiction stories which have been written and through these books it is possible to identify the region where the writer is from. Even when there are no direct names of the places being referred to or being represented in the text, some characteristics of the behavior, systems of administration, culture, and names of characters could be used to build a mental picture and enable the reader to know the geographical location which a particular novel was written in.

Thesis

In this essay, there will be an in-depth discussion and exploration of different geographical themes which exist in our chosen book, Behind the Beautiful Forever’s. This will be done with an attempt of examining the influences that geography has on how the story in the text was written. In order to do this, there are different sub-themes which can be used to explore the geographical issues in a text. Hence, in order to explore the geographical issues which shaped the story of this text, the following themes will be used; development, ethnic conflicts, and gender issues.

About the Text.

As stated in the introduction above, the chosen text for this essay is called Behind the Beautiful Forever’s: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. This is a book written by Katherine Boo, a white woman of American origin married to an Indian man who worked in the city. They both lived in Mumbai, a fact that made it possible for her to decide to conduct a research on the people of the slum area of Annawadi, and later put the findings in a book which she gave the above title.

She is a celebrated author who won an award named the Pulitzer Prize. This was a book classified as a non-fiction written back in the year 2012 and ever since it was published, it won several awards including the National Book Award and also the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In addition to this, in the year 2014, David Hare was able to adopt the book into a play that was shown in 2015 on National Theatre Live. The book was written as a description of Annawadi. This is a present-day slum area in the outskirts of Mumbai, India located near a developed area where the Chatrapatti Shivaji International Airport is located.1

The story is of a typical slum life of residents who include a young trash picker, a female slum lord and a local college student. The lives of these people are interconnected in that each of them is undergoing struggles, most of which they have to learn to come together in order to overcome poverty. The author presents a variety of problems which the people of the slum undergo each and every day and they include poverty, corruption, hunger, disease, fatigue and interpersonal conflicts brought about because of many families living in a small place.1

There are many ways which geography has influenced the story being written in this book. In fact, the purpose of the story itself was to bring to light the struggles which people in a particular geographical area, in this case, a slum outside Mumbai, go through each day in order to survive. Most of the issues depicted arise from the fact that the slum is located in an area owned by another state institution and hence made it illegal for them to be there in the first place. This made the people face a variety of difficulties due to geography which will be explored using the sub-themes below.

Development.

Different parts of the world have different levels of development. Despite development being good for a place in terms of job creation and economic progress in general, there are social issues which arise as negative impacts of development. In this case, development in Mumbai creates an important context that drives the story in the text written by Katherine Boo. We can hence define development geography as a geographical branch dealing with standards of living and quality of life of the human inhabitants of a certain place.

The place being talked about in the text is located in Mumbai, a major city in India. This is a nation which has highly invested in developmental projects in order to raise its economy. However, the country has a very high population, most of which cannot afford to live in the posh estates developed in the city even though they work and study there. Hence, Annawadi was created as a settlement for people who might have not been caught on the good side of the development efforts ongoing in the city. However, Annawadi is located in a piece of land owned by the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, a situation which meant the families that lived in the area lived by the mercies of development.2

Hence, the geographical subtheme of development has shaped the story in this text in many ways, one is the fact that Mumbai is a mark of development in India as a nation. This is a country ranked as the second fastest growing nation in the world and this growth has been brought by the fruits of development in that particular city. However, in the same jewel of development, there exist people who have been stepped on by the development efforts and have to work through scraps and filth in order to survive.

From the story, it is said that the slum area existed in the shadows of five star hotels which surrounded the airport. The people too had at some point to deal with an issue of eviction when the airport management was planning to expand as an effort to make the city more developed. Development is the major factor that led to the author writing the story. It was meant to bring out the fact that despite the city of Mumbai having changed a lot in terms of development in the past few years, there still was a population which was suffering due to this. Annawadi has been depicted as a filthy slum which was developed in a swampy area of a piece of land owned by Mumbai International Airport. The slum is surrounded on all the sides by luxury hotels and the modern airport itself which announce to the contemporary world the rising power of India a developed region.3

It also shows how development has become a tool that has been used to increase the gap between the poor and the rich in our societies. The people of the slums are families which have lived for long without seeing any benefit of development and they talk of better lives only when making jokes. The slum area exists on a boundary that separates the Old India and the New India showing how the rich on the better side were benefiting from the economic development, the poor were left to feed on the remnants. In the whole book, two geographical areas are represented and these are the undercity and the over city. The main difference between the two is development where those in the over city of Mumbai are more prosperous and affluent and enjoy the fruits that come with modernization while the ones in the under city are poverty stricken and the only news here is on suicides and theft.

There is even a wall which separates the developed area of the airport from the slum. An example is that separating the living quarters belonging to Husain from where Fatima lived. The wall itself acted as a symbol of development showing how it separated those who had attained some levels of prosperity from the poor. The wall was a physical representation of the effects that development had in the gap between those in poverty and those considered to be rich. In the text, two families, Abduls’ and Fatimas’ had for long been separated by just a sheet. But soon after, a wall was built showing that the Abduls’ had worked through the situation and beat poverty. Walls are marks of success and those on the dark side are always left to only hope for a time when they will break out and built also built a wall to separate themselves from the others.4

Development being a process of change affects people in different ways. It usually is perceived as an improvement of life of the people who are undergoing the change but to those whom the change has not reached, it might be the opposite. In a comment on the forces of global economy, Gunder Frank developed a theory, the dependency theory which explains some of the effects of development and economic forces which affect the society leading to the development of underdevelopment.

Through this, geographers established that there is high likelihood of the development of underdevelopment in some areas due to dependency. This is one of the major barriers to prosperity which is seen to affect the people living in Annawadi slums despite the fact that it is in the middle of very prosperous areas. There are also a number of other factors which play major roles in development geography which include lack of education, proper healthcare and institutions of governments. Poverty is also a general reason for underdevelopment because through poverty, education will not be given, there will be increased dependency, and indebtedness.

Most of the people who live in the slum areas around the world, just like Annawadi in this context face the same problems due to the same reasons. Sometimes, corruption comes at the forefront. There is much support given to such areas in order to aid in the improvement of lives in terms of healthcare and education. But lack of proper institutional control and general corruption in the departments of governance cause development of poor living standards. Sometimes, as more developed environments crop up, there is need for unskilled labor and most of these do not pay enough to enable them live the modern buildings in the city and still provide for them. Instead, they choose to live in such areas ruled by slumlords, corrupt individuals who survive by setting up illegal structures and making people pay to stay in them.

Most of the effective governments have made efforts dealing with most of the barriers which prevent people from such areas from being part of the development process like establishing housing at reduced prices but challenges arise due to dependency as most of the aided people do not learn to be independent. Most of them still go back to the slum areas after aid periods come to an end. Developmental geography creates a very important theme when developing stories about slum life. This is the opposite of progress existing very few yards away from what can be termed as progress. Researchers and authors should find the importance of addressing this issue in their texts.

Conflicts

At any point where there is interaction between many people at one place, conflicts are bound to happen.6 This is the situation of disagreement between people about different issues because of their beliefs of inclinations. Conflicts are part of the broad geographical themes which influence the development of stories by different authors. In the Story by Katherine Boo, there are many conflicts that exists in the society being talked about. The most evident conflict is one of the mindset when one is seen to have made it out of the slum. However, the conflict that exist due to ethnicity is between those who had the Muslim background and the Hindus.8

India was meant to be a secular nation but this respect seems to be eroding fast as indicated by the text. It has been shown that the Muslims in the area were being treated unequally in the workforce. This was seen due to the fact that some of them, could not be hired for reason that some Hindu people will miss out on the limited job positions. This brings about conflicts since these are people who have to live together and solve some of the problems which exist between them as a group. But problems arise when people begin putting themselves in groups according to their religions and ethnicity whenever certain services meant for all are being provided.8

Some of the conflicting situations occur due to corruption which seems to the major factor affecting the residents of this slum area just like other slum areas in the world. The officials will want to help only those in close relations with them or those known to support them and leave out the rest. This is the same situation that happens across the word when those in position take advantage of these groups of people who might not have enough knowledge to understand the effects that divisions and conflicts between people basing on ethnic backgrounds can cause.

The highest point of conflict is when a woman named Fatima sets herself on fire but blames the neighbors, the Hussain’s. They try to defend themselves against the allegations but due to the corrupt nature of the police, nothing is done to acquit them of the crime and the end up being sent to jail, Abdul, the youngest in the family, taken to juvenile detention. This leaves the wife to Karam called Kehkashan to spend most of her time moving from prison to prison visiting her family while trying to find a way of helping them be set free. This drives her to near insanity, but this is a norm in Annawadi. Most of the people either go insane or die because of the poor quality of life in the slum area.9

Gender Issues

Gender issues in the world of today are common especially as most of the societies try to fight for the equality of women in the world. The rise of feminists has also made gender issue to be very much spoken about in the contemporary world. But despite all these efforts, the text still shows that India has not been able to do this in all aspects. In an example, there are nine days in a year where girls would consider themselves the same as boys. This was during the Navratri festival. It is very sad to see that this still goes on in the world today. Despite being a culture that might be meaningful to the people of that geographical region, it lacks meaning in other places as both the genders should celebrate equality each and every day.7

There is also the depiction in the story that a girl has to behave maturely in all situations even as a young girl. Example, even during the festivals of Navratri, when all were supposed to be equals, the young girls are still denied the chance to take part in some games which the boys were playing. This gender issue is also notable in Mena’s situation where she was beaten up because she was not able to prepare a meal for the brother. This meant that the female gender in this society was still considered as one to do the household activities even when it affected some of the activities they were taking part in.10

There is also the fact that the women were being married too early. An example is Meena who was only 15 but was given away to become a wife to someone and she had no say on the matter. This could be one of the reasons which led to her committing suicide as life seemed to move so fast for her despite there being very many difficulties. However, despite the fact that the people of female gender have some challenges, there are situations where they have risen to be powerful in the society. An example of this is Asha who is one of the wealthy people in the society with connections in the political arena.

The gender issue in the world have been fought in many ways but the problem arises when there is too much focus given to fighting problems of one gender and forgetting another. An example in this situation is Sunil Shurma, a young and focused boy who has taken the responsibility of caring for his younger sister at the age of 12. He struggles each and every day to find food to eat because his father is too drunk to care about life. He does this for long without taking part in activities that are illegal until the day he meets Kalu who now changes his behavior of survival to one which involved illegal acts like sneaking into a factory to steal. Lack of proper mechanisms of educating the boy child on how to survive has caused the reduction of morality in the boy child, even those who might have turned out differently when given just a little push.

Today, most of the efforts put to solve issues on gender are directed at issues that mostly affect those of the female gender since for centuries, nothing was done to improve their situation despite playing an important role in the society. However, there is an alarming rate to which those of male gender are ending up in prisons and out of schools. It is common to find more girls in a classroom today than boys simply because the empowerment programs forgot to also make this group know of the opportunities they can exploit in order to live lives which do not involve criminal activities.10

Different societies in different geographical locations will depict different issues related to gender. There are those that will show some leniency to one side and there are those which are neutral to both. Gender issues are hence important themes whenever an author is writing about issues which affect any society in any particular geographical location.

Conclusion.

This essay has looked at some three very important sub-themes which affect the writings of different authors. Such issues may differ according to the geographical differences in the settings. But, Katherine Boo did an excellent job in her text, ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.’ She was able to bring out the situation in that slum area of Mumbai in a way that one could relate to and feel that there is need for some issues in our society to be looked at. Despite there being some downsides, it still remains one of the best non-fiction works ever written.

References

1. Boo, Katherine (2012). Behind the Beautiful Forevers. New York: Random House. ISBN 1-59413-618-1.

2. Paul Hopper, 2012. Understanding Development. United Kingdom. Polity Press.

3. Mark M. Miller, 2017. Economic Development for Everyone: Creating Jobs, Growing businesses. U.K. Taylor and Francis.

4. Jan Dreze, Amartya Sean, 2012. India: Development and Participation. New York. Oxford University Press.

5. Ananya Roy, 2011. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. NY. Routledge.

6. Isaac Chotiner. Poverty as Destiny: Behind the Beautiful Forevers. New Republic Magazine. Feb 2012. Retrieved from: https://newrepublic.com/article/100563/

7. Kacee Aldridge. Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Cultural Front. March 10th, 2014. From www.culturalfront.org/ 2014/10/behind-the-beautiful-forevers-chapter-12.html? m=1

8. Cameron Niemann. Religious Tensions in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Prezi. September 2014. Retrieved from: https://prezi.com/sr_xtij5ng_p/religious-tensions-in-behind-the-beautiful-forevers/

9. Nishika Patel. Battle over Mumbai’s Slums. The Guardian. March 2011. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/mar/11/mumbai-slums-developers-profits-residents

10. Arora (2012). "Gender inequality, economic development, and globalization: A state level analysis of India". The Journal of Developing Areas. 46 (1): 147–164. doi:10.1353/jda.2012.0019