Katherine Boo Quotes

So do I have to teach you all over again how to make the rotis round?" Asha teased her daughter, merrily holding one of them up. "Come on! Who will marry you when you make such ridiculous bread?" The

But in her current mood, small affronts were bundled with larger disappointments and became a body of evidence.

I have been dealing with illness and its manifestations since I was a teenager, and I think that gives me a very healthy respect for the things in life we can't control.

It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.

In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India's modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.

He personally found the bathing ritual not just pointless but self-deceiving. Getting fresh for a fresh day, in which something new might happen! He thought it better to start the day by acknowledging that it was going to be just as dull as the days preceding it. That way, you wouldn't be disappointed.

I'm not squeamish.

Though every community is different, my personal rule is pretty much the same: It's O.K. to feel like an idiot going in as long as you don't sound like an idiot coming out.

At the heart of her bad nature, like many bad natures, was probably envy. And at the heart of envy was possibly hope - that the good fortune of others might one day be hers

We talk a lot about infrastructure in cities, and it's talking about highways and it's talking about trains, but I think more important to people who are low income is, how do I get from here to there? How do I become part of the affluence that's surrounding me?

Becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens.

To be poor in Annawadi, or in any Mumbai slum, was to be guilty of one thing or another.

The lyrics, in English, were meaningless to him, the bass line irresistible.

In his first weeks back home, scavenging skills rusty, he took the sandals from the feet of his sleeping father and sold them to Abdul for food.

Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other's secrets.

When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that's not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure.

As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.

The better I know you, the more I will dislike you, and the more you will dislike me. So let us keep to ourselves.

You think your work is dreaming?

Ghosts of women are the worst. Years go by and they don't leave you be

No one knows, but don't worry," Zehrunisa said. "Just leave everything to God and keep praying. Now we have a lawyer who will say the right words, and then it will end, because the judge will pick up the truth."
"Pick up the truth," he repeated skeptically. As if truth were a coin on a footpath. He changed the subject.

Only in the hours when the men came - husband at work, daughters at school - did the part of her body she had to offer feel more important than the part of it she lacked.

Rich people's garbage was every year more complex, rife with hybrid materials, impurities, impostors. Planks that looked like wood were shot through with plastic. How was he to classify a loofah? The owners of the recycling plants demanded waste that was all one thing, pure.

He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate.

The municipality sent water through six Annawadi faucets for ninety minutes in the morning and ninety minutes at night. Shiv Sena men had appropriated the taps, charging usage fees to their neighbors. These water-brokers were resented, but not as much as the renegade World Vision social worker who had collected money from Annawadians for a new tap, then run away with it.

Like most people in the slum, and in the world, for that matter, he believed his own dreams properly aligned to his capacities.

I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.

Every month that passed, he felt less sure of where he belonged among the human traffic in the city below. Once he had believed he was smart and might become something - not a big something, like the people who frequented the airport, but a middle something. Being on the roof, even if he had come up to steal things, was a way of not being what he had become in Annawadi.

But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained. As

The astonishing thing is that some people are good, and that many others try to be.

But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don't want to live in that world.

For myself, suffering doesnt make me a good person; it makes me selfish. Why do we think that people who have less should find it edifying?

To Annawadians, a difficult-to-raze house increased the odds that a family's tenure on airport land would be acknowledged by the relocation authorities. And so they put their money into what would be destroyed.

Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her own.

Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.

Taking his cup, the soldier had stared at her for a long moment and said, 'Don't stand in the sun-- you'll get too dark" (141).

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.

Two boys who looked to be seven years old had been picked up while sweeping floors in a cheap hotel. They reminded Abdul of his little brothers, and he felt emotional being around them. He couldn't see why the state had taken them from their parents. Being so poor that you had to work so young seemed like punishment enough.

Abdul had kept to himself in his first days at Dongri, aware of his inadequacy in the conversational arts, but the incarceration of the seven-year-olds inflamed him. "What's the use, keeping them here?" he blurted out one day. "You see their faces? So much enthusiasm for life, they are going to break the walls of this jail. The government people should let them work, let them be free.

Everything around us is roses, and we're the shit in between.

An awkward, uneducated boy might still be capable of righteousness: He intended to remember this and every other truth The Master spoke.

If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?

One chronicler writes of an area of India during the end of the 20th century: Almost no-one in this slum was poor by Indian benchmarks. ... True, a few residents trapped rats and frogs and fried them for dinner. A few ate the scrub grass at the sewage lake edge. And these individuals, miserable souls, thereby made an inestimable contribution to their neighbors. They gave those slum dwellers who didn't fry rats and eat weeds a sense of their upward mobility.

For years, Asha had hoped that her daughter wouldn't guess about the men. Now she wished she had raised Manju to be worldly enough to understand. This wasn't about lust or being modern, though she knew that many first-class people slept around. Nor was it just about feeling loved and beautiful. This was about money and power.

Everyone is Annawadi talks like this- oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich. It's vanity, nothing more. Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, "What a navigator I am!" And then the wind blows you east. -ABDUL'S FATHER, KARAM HUSAIN

And now out onto Airport Road and into the city's horn-honk opera.

She was simply Asha, a woman on her own. Had the situation been otherwise, she might not have come to know her own brain.

And maybe because of the boiling April sun, he thought about water and ice. Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He himself was probably a little different from the corrupt people around him. Ice was distinct from - and in his view, better than - what it was made of. He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai's dirty water, he wanted to be ice. He wanted to have ideals.

I was spending a lot of time in Mumbai after I met my husband, who is Indian, and while parts of the city were prospering like crazy, I couldn't quite make out how the new wealth had changed the prospects of the majority of city residents who lived in slums. So after a few years I stopped wondering and started reporting.

The age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional.

What, exactly, she had been protesting was subject to interpretation. To the poorest, her self-immolation was a response to enervating poverty. To the disabled, it reflected the lack of respect accorded the physically impaired. To the unhappily married, who were legion, it was a brave indictment of oppressive unions. Almost no one spoke of envy, a stone slab, a poorly made wall, or rubble that had fallen into rice.

Zehrunisa didn't know Abdul's age herself. Seventeen was what she'd said before the burning, when people asked her, but he could have been twenty-seven, for all she knew. You didn't keep track of a child's years when you were fighting daily to keep him from starving, as she and many other Annawadi mothers had been doing when their teenagers were young.

It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn't hit you, the slumlord you hadn't offended, the malaria you hadn't caught.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust him.

He wanted to go home to the place that he hated.

A girl could be virtuous without being perfect. Back

Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too.

I hear of this love so often that I think I know it, but I don't feel it, and I myself don't know why,' he fretted. 'These people who love and then the girlfriend goes away - they cut their arms with a blade, they put a cigarette butt out on their hand, they won't sleep, they won't eat, they'll sing - they must have different hearts than mine.

My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what's happening to people who have none.

Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, "What a navigator I am!" And then the wind blows you east.

A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all.

Midnight was closing in, the one-legged woman was grievously burned, and the Mumbai police were coming for Abdul and his father.

In the age of globalization - an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age - hope is not a fiction.

Abdul's deepest affection was for his two-year-old brother, Lallu, a fact that had begun
to concern him. Listening to Bollywood love songs, he could only conclude that his own
heart had been made too small. He'd never longed with extravagance for a girl, and
while he felt certain he loved his mother, the feeling didn't come in any big gush. But he
could get tearful just looking at Lallu, who was as fearless as Abdul was flinchy. All
those swollen rat bites on his cheeks, on the back of his head.

Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions were paid. Such choices had evolved over the years into a principle: The best government is the one that gets out of the way.
The attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi, in which executives and socialites died, had served as a blunt correction. The wealthy now saw that their security could not be requisitioned privately. They were dependent on the same public safety system that ill served the poor.

In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers. Among

Still, Kasab seemed lucky to Abdul. "They will probably beat him lots in the jail," Abdul said one day, "but at least Kasab knows in his heart that he did what they said he did." That had to be less stressful than being beaten when you were innocent. The

Fatima's hair, what was left of it, had pulled free of the coil into which she'd put it before striking the match. Her face was now black and shiny, as if an artist commissioned to lacquer the eyes of a statue of

It made sense to Abdul that in a polyglot city, people would sort themselves as he sorted his garbage, like with like.

I grew up in a second when my mother died," he told Sunil. "My father and brother didn't understand me.

Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter's end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road. It was the walk of a boy on his way to school, taking his time, eating air. His trash sack was empty on this first leg of his daily route, so it could be tucked under his arm or worn over his shoulders like a superhero cape. When Sister Paulette passed by in her chauffeured white van, it could be draped over his head. Sister Paulette-Toilet was how he thought of her now. He imagined her riding down Airport Road looking for children more promising than he.

Triumphant, Asha felt confirmed in a suspicion she'd developed in her years of multi-directional, marginally profitable enterprise. Becoming a success in the great, rigged market of the overcity required less effort and intelligence than getting by, day to day, in the slums. The crucial things were luck and the ability to sustain two convictions: that what you were doing wasn't all that wrong, in the scheme of things, and that you weren't all that likely to get caught.

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai's dirty water, he wanted to be ice ... He wanted to be recognized as better than the dirty water in which he lived. He wanted a verdict of ice.

Avoid trouble. This was the operating principle of Abdul Hakim Husain, an idea so fiercely held that it seemed imprinted on his physical form.

People talk about places like Mumbai as a tale of two cities, as if the rich and poor don't have anything to do with each other.

I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.

While independent India had been founded by high-born, well-educated men, by the twenty-first century few such types stood for elections, or voted in them, since the wealthy had extra-democratic means of securing their social and economic interests. Across India, poor people were the ones who took the vote seriously. It was the only real power they had. Another

Rahul had been underwhelmed by the New Year's rituals of the rich. "Moronic," he had concluded. "Just people drinking and dancing and standing around acting stupid, like people here do every night."

"The hotel people get strange when they drink," he told his friends. "Last night at the end of the party, there was one hero-good-looking, stripes on his suit, expensive cloth. He was drunk, full tight, and he started stuffing bread into his pants pockets, jacket pockets. Then he put more rolls straight into his pants! Rolls fell on the floor and he was crawling under the table to get them. This one waiter was saying the guy must have been hungry, earlier- that whiskey brought back the memory. But when I get rich enough to be a guest at a big hotel, I'm not going to act like such a loser.