Dear Friends;
Today, New York Times presents the following (03 03 2012) 1. Image of the Day, March 2 2. In Delhi and Mumbai Dueling Fashion (ans Fashion Weeks) 3. Dignity With the Wealh of Nations: 4. Newswallah: To Learn About The Poor, Live With Them (Reproduced below); -bhuban Newswallah: To Learn About the Poor, Live With Them By NEHA THIRANI Patricia Wall/The New York Times “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” by Katherine Boo. Katherine Boo’s recently published “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is the latest in a series of narrative non-fiction books coming out of India. The book is set in Annawadi, a slum located near Mumbai’s international airport. Its central characters include Abdul, a garbage sorter, members of his family and neighbors. Ms. Boo’s book includes meticulous descriptions and observations that she gathered during the four years she spent in Annawadi. Though she worked with a translator, she managed to blend into the background. Ms. Boo has said that she“aspires to invisibility” – a feat she manages until the author’s note at the end. Ms. Boo is not alone in capturing the hardship of the destitute in India by embedding herself with her subjects. Over the years many journalists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists and writers have tried to understand poverty by thrusting themselves into the lives and circumstances that they are writing about, either through a lengthy stay or multiple long visits. The tradition goes back more than a century. Journalist Upton Sinclair Jr., who exposed the horrific conditions of the American meatpacking industry, is considered a pioneer. For his 1906 book, “The Jungle,” Sinclair spent seven weeks working in a meatpacking plant in a Chicago stockyard. Verrier Elwin, an English ethnographer and activist, who came to India in the early 20th century as a Christian missionary, was one of the first people to study India’s tribal customs. Ramachandra Guha’s biography “Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India,” sheds light on his work on the Baigas and Gonds of central India, where he lived and married into one of the communities. In recent times, there have been many writers have attempted to bring “the other India” to the fore. Aman Sethi, a correspondent for The Hindu newspaper, spent five years tracking daily-wage workers in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar area. His book, “A Free Man,” dispels conventional notions about the working poor, replacing it with a more nuanced consideration. “I want to understand the mazdoor ki zindagi (the workers’ life),” Sethi tells Mohammad Ashraf, a painter who becomes the central character in his narrative. It is often a single relationship with an “insider” that helps authors understand their subjects. For Sonia Faleiro, a writer and contributor to India Ink, that central character was Leela, the highest paid dancer at Night Lovers, a dance bar on the outskirts of Mumbai. Leela is the main character in Ms. Faleiro’s “A Beautiful Thing.” The author spent five years getting to know Leela, her friends, family and neighbors, conducting hundreds of interviews. The Independent newspaper writes that her sensitive rendering combined“rigorous journalistic research with the narrative skills of a novelist.” While some choose to focus on a single person, others like Siddhartha Deb use many characters. His book “The Beautiful and the Damned” takes us into the lives of migrant workers, technology professionals, traders, businessman, millionaires and waitresses. He paints a varied and fascinating picture of “new India.” Earlier, in 2004, when Mr. Deb was asked by The Guardian in 2004 to write a long piece on call centers, he went to work in one. “In order to take a job where I might have to change my name and accent and become a Western person, I first had to erase most traces of the West from my existing self,” he wrote. Journalist Rahul Pandita’s attempt to give voice to the disempowered took him deep into the forests of Dandakarenya, into Abujhmaad, Bhojpur, Naxalbari and Bastar. In “Hello, Bastar,” Mr. Pandita traces the history of the Naxal, or Maoist, movement through his experiences in Bastar, a district in the state of Madhya Pradesh. Peppered with anecdotal instances and the stories of individuals, the account attempts to go beyond what most newspapers have already reported. Among other journalists who spend large amounts of time in rural India Palagummi Sainath, the rural affairs editor for The Hindu, is an eminent example. In 1993, after being awarded a Times of India fellowship to report from rural India, Mr. Sainath travelled across the 10 poorest districts of five states for two years. Much of that reportage went into his book “Everybody Loves A Good Drought,”which helped bring public attention to rural India. To be certain, efforts to inhabit the surroundings of their subjects can go awry. Norwegian freelance journalist Åsne Seierstad won many accolades for her novel “The Bookseller of Kabul.” But the family that inspired her novel later sued her for invasion of privacy and factual inaccuracy. She was acquitted of those charges after an eight-year legal battle. Ms. Seierstad entered Kabul two weeks after Sept. 11 and met the Afghan book-seller Shah Muhummad Rais, who sold books previously banned by the Taliban. She spent months with his family, and based the characters in her book on them while changing their names. Some writers though, manage to maintain good relationships with their subjects. French journalist Dominique Lapierre, stayed in Calcutta, now Kolkata, for two years researching the slum which became the basis of “City of Joy.” After the book was published Lapierre donated half the royalties of the book to support various humanitarian causes in Kolkata and continues to work with urban poor in the city through his foundation, City of Joy Aid. In many cases, writes have no choice but to be embedded, to use a term often associated with war journalism, with their subjects. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, an Indian American sociologist, was taken hostage when conducting research in a housing project in Chicago. He then spent seven years hanging out in the neighborhood and writing “Gang Leader for a Day.” _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
