Indian Dream

A book I want to read.

I hear it's about Mumbai, but having read an excerpt, I believe it to be about contemporary India, or the India that is a maddening contradiction in being both incredibly "rich" (second only to China in its growth rate) and mind-numbingly poor.

What is striking to me is Boo's ability to capture the Mumbai underbelly's version of upward mobility.

The residents of Annawadi, a decrepit slum sandwiched between islands of affluence in the city, live their life believing in the narrative of a freshly minted Indian dream (a counterpart of the American dream). They live, as one resident claims, like "shit", surrounded by "roses."

They don't like living in the "shit" but they're not angry at the rich for their condition. Unlike the angry poor of an older India I grew up witnessing on celluloid and in political upheavals tinted with Marxist (anti-rich) sloganeering, the new breed of urban poor seem to have tremendous faith in their ability to "make it" in the new India.

Annawadians, as Boo calls them, as though Annawadi is a sovereign territory within the landmass of Mumbai, have distinct dreams:

There was too much wanting at Annawadi lately, or so it seemed to Abdul. As India began to prosper, old ideas about accepting the life assigned by one’s caste or one’s divinities were yielding to a belief in earthly reinvention. Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past. 

Abdul’s brother Mirchi did not intend to sort garbage. He envisioned wearing a starched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel. He’d heard of waiters who spent all day putting toothpicks into pieces of cheese, or aligning knives and forks on tables. He wanted a clean job like that. “Watch me!” he’d once snapped at their mother. “I’ll have a bathroom as big as this hut!” 

The dream of Raja Kamble, a sickly toilet-cleaner who lived on the lane behind Abdul’s, was of medical rebirth. A new valve to fix his heart and he’d survive to finish raising his children. Fifteen-year-old Meena, whose hut was around the corner, craved a taste of the freedom and adventure she’d seen on TV serials, instead of an arranged marriage and domestic submission. Sunil, an undersized twelve-year-old scavenger, wanted to eat enough to start growing. Asha, a fightercock of a woman who lived by the public toilet, was differently ambitious. She longed to be Annawadi’s first female slumlord, then ride the city’s inexorable corruption into the middle class. Her teenaged daughter, Manju, considered her own aim more noble: to become Annawadi’s first female college graduate.

Mirchi's dream is startlingly refreshing. Were Mirchi to be growing up in the 70s and 80s, in the regime of Indira Gandhi, he wouldn't thus glorify the job of a waiter and aspire to a job that entails inserting "toothpicks into pieces of cheese," as it would be against his self-respect and dignity to do. Respect was a big word in the lexicon of the poor in Socialist India. But today's poor, symbolized by Mirchi, want to get inside the luxury hotels, if not as a guest, then at least as a lowly wait-staff (poor Mirchi doesn't know that the wait-staff are also made to clean the shit left behind by the rich sojourners).

I feel like Raja's dream is touching, as are the girls', Meena and Manju's. Asha is clearly seeking empowerment in wanting to be a ruthless slumlord.

But they all want to move up the economic ladder. That is a normal desire the world over. However, when one reads about the life in Annawadi, it becomes hard to conceive of such a movement. 

The ideology of India's (free) market economy has succeeded, it seems, in ensuring that if not wealth, then at least the dream of making more and living better, has trickled down to the wretchedest of the wretched in India. 

I think they're in for a huge disappointment, though if one were to follow the logic of India's free-market economy guru numero uno Nandan Nilekani argument, the Mirchi's, the Asha's and the Manju's of today are India's human capital that needs to be thoroughly mined. To be sure, the station of Mirchi's life will be better if he were to get inside the Hyatt from the shit pond on whose edge he and his family are living (in a card board hut). But how is he to get there with all the other masses of slum boys eyeing the same prize post? More importantly, will he really get there, or will he perish or get criminalized through police brutality as a child. 

Boo writes of extreme police brutality in Annawadi. The police have a ball extorting, bullying, terrorizing and raping the Annawadians and they aren't accountable for their acts. 

Mirchi and his family (of eight siblings), for instance are hiding from the police because the police suspect them of having burnt to death the one-legged woman. Their neighbors, who are primarily Hindus, have managed to scapegoat Mirchi's family because they are the only Muslims in Annawadi.

Yet nobody had liked the one-legged woman as she had the reputation of being an immoral slut who slept around with men for pleasure. Anybody could have been responsible for her death. The One-legged woman herself could have put an end to her life, unable to endure the ostracism.

The poor of Annawadi, especially the children whose minds have been invaded by dreams of future well-being, are perilously perched to sink into the bottom most level of the shit pond they are so desirous of escaping from. 

Yet, they dream of rising from the pits to the status of working-class.

I liked the one-legged woman's dream the best:

Her abiding interest was in extramarital sex, though not for pocket change alone. That, her neighbors would have understood. But the One Leg also wanted to transcend the affliction by which others had named her. She wanted to be respected and reckoned attractive. Annawadians considered such desires inappropriate for a cripple.

Ah, here is someone who wanted to be raised to visibility that only the "respectable" have in India.

Sadly, because her dream stood out and was thought of as "preposterous," she had to go.

Irony: It is permissible, even socially applauded, to become a toothpick-thrusting waiter in a five-star hotel, but it's daring and impossible for a disreputable woman to want to be respected.

India, after all, hasn't fundamentally changed.