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bookwormmichelle 's review for:
This book is quite an experience. It is intense. I was expecting frank poverty--I got it. This several-year following of the lives of a number of families in a Mumbai slum is heartbreaking. It is impossible not to root for all these people trying to better their lives and lift themselves out of poverty, out of living in makeshift huts on the edges of a sewage pond--and crying when life smacks them down again. A number of the followed people end up dying before the end of the book. Again, I expected all this--what I didn't expect was the depth and pervasiveness of the corruption all around these people. I was stunned to see the corruption even extending--regularly, no exceptions--to the government and Western aid and charity programs, which government officials, aid workers and even nuns were shown as exploiting heartlessly and taking the cash while leaving the people no better off.
Really makes one think about those charitable donations--how do we know the same isn't happening? Sigh. The author seems upset at the government of India, no surprise, for failing to provide even minimal standards of justice and basic services, and she also seems upset at "globalization" as turning this entire slum into garbage-pickers for the international market--but I don't know what it is she thinks they might be doing in the absence of global markets, exactly. She never really did a good job of tying the plight of the slumdwellers to international capitalism except to excoriate lowered recycling prices to the global economic recession. Still, this is a powerful book and I'll never look at a picture of a slum or read a description of women's microfinance cooperatives or educational aid funds in quite the same way again.
Really makes one think about those charitable donations--how do we know the same isn't happening? Sigh. The author seems upset at the government of India, no surprise, for failing to provide even minimal standards of justice and basic services, and she also seems upset at "globalization" as turning this entire slum into garbage-pickers for the international market--but I don't know what it is she thinks they might be doing in the absence of global markets, exactly. She never really did a good job of tying the plight of the slumdwellers to international capitalism except to excoriate lowered recycling prices to the global economic recession. Still, this is a powerful book and I'll never look at a picture of a slum or read a description of women's microfinance cooperatives or educational aid funds in quite the same way again.