Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.
It's actually Saturday, but Tuesday-me will
be on vacation so you're stuck with Saturday-me,
a.k.a.
The-Fault-in-Our-Stars-movie-came-out-in-America-yesterday-me,
a.k.a. the tiredest me I have ever been.
So okay just briefly, at the moment it looks
like The Fault in Our Stars is going to be
the number one movie in America this week,
beating out movies that cost like hundreds
of millions of dollars to make.
The reviews have been amazing and according
to Rotten Tomatoes, 93% of people who've seen
it liked it, so just real quickly: YEEEEEEEEES!
Okay dramatic tonal shift, let's begin to
talk about books that are not yet movies,
but should be.
I'm speaking of course about Behind the Beautiful
Forevers, the book that we're reading this
summer in the Nerdfighter Book Club.
I wanna start our conversation about it today
by talking about the first four chapters.
So in this book we meet a bunch of people
who live in this slum in Mumbai called Annawadi.
Now those of us who don't live in slums tend
to imagine those who do rather monolithically,
but it slowly becomes clear that there's a
lot of diversity in class and status in Annawadi.
Right, like the life of a malnourished garbage-picker
Sunil is very different from the life of Ahmet
who buys and sorts that garbage, and very
different from Manju's life, who's aspiring
to become the first resident of Annawadi to
graduate from college.
So that's the first and easiest level of complexity
that's added to our understanding of life
in places like Annawadi.
Not all poverty is equal and not all people
living in poverty are identical.
But it becomes much more complex, like we
think of government corruption as a cause
of poverty, right?
And it often is.
But for Manju's mother Asha, it's also a way
out of poverty.
We think of empowering women with loans from
microfinance organizations to be an engine
that can drive social and economic change
in communities, and it can be.
But Asha hoards and abuses microfinance-loans
in order to get ahead.
I should add here for all the Nerdfighters
who give loans via Kiva, that that's why Kiva
didn't work in India until very recently and
now does so only with, like, crazy lots of
restrictions.
But anyway, the complexity that's most striking
to me is that we all think of funding schools
as being good, and it is.
But Manju goes to a charity-funded college
were one can graduate basically by reading
CliffsNotes.
Although to be fair, that's also the case
with some American universities.
For me, the brilliance of Behind the Beautiful
Forevers is that it refuses to allow those
of us who live in the rich world to hide behind
shields like microfinance and charity.
In one of my favorite passages, a kid says,
"Everything around us is roses, and we're
the shit in between."
Boo goes on to write about pink condominiums
and glass offices shooting up all around Annawadi,
a clear metaphor for the roses.
The implication here I think is that without
manure, roses can't grow.
In order to have all of our inexpensive consumer
goods, the rich need the poor, and we need
them to stay poor.
That's a very discomforting thing to consider,
but we shouldn't look away from it.
But then again, as Boo points out, almost
no one living in Annawadi is actually poor,
at least according to official definitions.
Sunil the garbage-collector may have to take
puffs off of discarded cigarettes to ward
of hunger pangs, but he still lives on more
than $1.25 a day.
And when we say that a hundred million people
have emerged from poverty in India in the
last few decades, we're talking at least in
part about residents of Annawadi.
By many measures, life is better for people
living in Annawadi than it would be without
global capitalism and this fantastic growth
of the over-city.
This is a book that resists reductive readings.
No matter your ideology, it gets challenged.
Okay one last thing: it seems to me that in
the first 100 pages, the greatest mover of
the narrative is not like corruption or discrimination
or ambition or any of that, but luck.
Or fate, I guess, depending on your worldview.
But I mean the chance of having your hand
cut off while working as a kid at a recycling
plant or having a bum heart or an alcoholic
parent or being falsely accused of assault.
As Abduhl's father says, "Your little boat
goes west, and you congratulate yourself.
'What a navigator I am.'
And then the wind blows you east."
So Nerdfighters, I'm interested in what you
took away from the first four chapters of
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, but I also
wanna know what you think of luck.
Like how do you make sense of a world where
luck plays such a huge role in your triumphs
and tragedies?
Thanks for reading the book with me.
Hank, I will see you on Friday.
