Behind the Beautiful Forevers
A boy who makes his living sorting the airport slum's garbage, reported over three years with nothing invented.
Boo reported for three years in Annawadi, a settlement beside Mumbai airport, and wrote a book with no composite characters and no invented scenes. Its centre is Abdul, a teenager who supports his family by sorting other people’s rubbish, and the machinery of police, courts and NGOs that closes around him after a neighbour’s death. The scrap trade is the economy here, and Boo treats it as a business rather than a spectacle.
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Adam Minter
Boo also points out how in 2008, with the global financial crash, global demand for raw materials crashed and it had a very deleterious effect on the ability of these trash pickers to make a living.
Interview · February 2014
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