Boo Prologue to 50

I missed the first entry so I am doing a combined set of posts.

The first thing that strikes me about this novel is it's blend of narrative and fact; right off the bat we get a sense that Boo knows these characters inside and out, meaning Boo has done an incredible amount of research (very personal, interview-based research) to get to the point of being able to write from a multitude of perspectives of real people.

She builds us a picture of a community through these characters, selecting a few to stay with and follow closely in their daily lives and most especially in their professional lives. How to describe a slum to an outsider who's never set foot in one? Describe how people make a living. The vivid descriptions of garbage collecting/sorting, thievery, and hierarchical advice-giving paint a vivid picture of the community.

I think a big part of Boo’s reason for writing is to portray a slum, a place that few outsiders enter and few outsiders (myself included) think of as a culture, is to represent it as one that has different parts and didn’t people with unique roles that come together to create a living, breathing community. Slums are disregarded places, places viewed far more simply than they are portrayed in Boo’s work, one-sided places where people without anywhere else to live build homes out of whatever they can find. But lo, they have a brothel, they have distinct sections of their town, and they have a hierarchy. There is Asha, strategically sending her daughter to college and, through knowing the right people, she’s gained respect and is sought for advice. And there is Abdul, climbing the economical scale through vigorous, monotonous work, constantly, and he and his family have an escape plan.

An important idea is that this way of life, the New India, is spurred by Western economical practices, and India is playing catch up with an enormous population, meaning that some will fall by the wayside, but still be important cogs in the new economical machine. The religious tensions seem to be spurred in the younger generation by this economical march forward (a fear that the Muslims from up north will steal the jobs, and they should return to the north), while at the same time, it can also distract from those tensions, when people of different religions come together to steal or collect recycleables. The Western economical system is dramatically changing the landscape of India, obliterating slum-people’s jobs of carrying peoples luggage to taxis at airports, yet also erecting hotels where slum-people can work as servers for a night or two, if they’re lucky. It’s the American Dream, translated harshly to India.