Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

The book title is clunky. It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. When ordering my copy from Infibeam I typed ‘Beyond’ instead of ‘Behind’ in the search field. The search engine promptly amended it, though. The title comes from an advertising hoarding for Italian floor tiles that used to be on the since demolished wall behind which the by now world-renowned slum abutting the Mumbai airport, Annawadi, exists. Though clunkily named, the book is far from clunky. It reads like a Charles Dickens novel set in present-day Mumbai, though fiction it most definitely is not. Katherine Boo has done an exceptional job of making us feel – albeit at second hand − what it’s like to exist like a virtual nobody at the bottom of the social pyramid of Heartbreak City with the most tenuous “temp work” link with the life in the legitimate metropolis − and with all the cards in the deck stacked against the subsister. No names have been changed to protect anyone’s privacy or to ward off the peril of getting sued for defamation. The book is a piece of pure reportage devoid of judgemental subtext – an admirable feat rarely achieved in chronicling life, high or low. Being an outsider may have helped Boo to reach this state of equanimity while telling the Annawadi story. It certainly seems to have lent a down-to-earth perspective to the narrative. Will the publication of Behind the Beautiful Forevers make a difference to the lives of Annawadians? Local politician and 'slum boss' Asha Waghekar doesn’t think so. http://yhoo.it/GCn7bq. Her neighbour, Akhtar Husain, a younger sibling of Abdul who is one of the main ‘characters’ in Boo’s book, agrees with Asha. Boo is hopeful that the publicity garnered by her work may work in favour of Annawadi and other slums particularly because she has removed the cloak of invisibility from the unconscionable injustices heaped on the innocent slum dwellers. http://bit.ly/GEzqWg. Let us hope she is right. Only Time will tell, I guess.

The black buck stops here.

I am not for capital punishment. In fact, I’m against any sort of punishment. I don’t think it works in changing behaviour. So, I am not a part of the whisper campaign that goes: Do unto Salman as he did into the black buck: shot her legs and slit her throat with a knife. My view has nothing to do with his giving away pedal bikes to street urchins or a Rs 25-lakh Mercedes to a fellow artiste or a lakh of rupees for the medical treatment of the Dalit poet who called Mumbai a whore once upon a time. To retract a bit, I first became aware of his propensity to give away pedal bikes sometime towards the end of the last millennium. On my way back from a business trip to Colombo, I had broken journey in Bangalore to visit Ashu, Nandini, Aditi and Avantika in their Koramangala residence. Salman was then shooting a David Dhawan flick there. Nandini, Aditi and Avantika had gone to watch the shooting. Avantika who used to be quite a smart tot caught Salman’s eye and fancy. Pat came a mock marriage proposal with a pedal bike thrown in as an additional incentive. I remember calling the gesture “cute” and “sweet” like everyone else. All this happened before the poor guy’s sadistic steak made a public showing: manhandling girl friends, mowing down street dwellers, slitting the throat of a member of an endangered species and who knows what else. And, yet his colleagues and fans – who, I’m sure, are all honourable men and women – say that he is a victim of celebrity, a much misunderstood person, a benefactor of humanity. Maybe I’m mistaken but I happen to strongly feel one ought to side with the Bishnois and Maneka Gandhi here.