MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. One of the most notorious slums in the Indian city of Mumbai is anything but invisible. Annawadi sits right next to Mumbai's airport and a batch of luxury hotels, but the thousands of people who live there are a rather invisible lot. Dumpster divers, toilet cleaners, some thieves scraping to make it through each day in one of the poorest pockets of a country that, by some measures, is home to a 1/3 of the planet's poor.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIKatherine Boo built her career in journalism by chronicling the stories of the poor, the disadvantaged and the invisible, including those right here in Washington, D.C. and she spent more than three years following the lives of those inside Annawadi, from the sewage stench ground inside of the slum. The product of her reporting is a narrative that challenges many of the western perceptions of India, a rising economic power on the global stage, and it's a window into a level of poverty that is still hard for many Americans to even imagine.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIKatherine Boo joins us in studio. Her new book is called "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity." She's a staff writer for the New Yorker. She won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000 when she was writing for the Washington Post. Katherine Boo, good to see you.

MS. KATHERINE BOOThank you, Kojo, for having me.

NNAMDIThank you so much for joining us. India is a country that we've been told is on the move. It's a rising giant. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has waxed poetically for years about a place where hordes of people, hundreds of millions of cell phones and limitless potential to compete on the global stage. But you spent more than three years studying India, not from the point of view of technology firms in Bangladore, but from the sludge -- Bangalore, I should say, but from the sludge of the Annawadi slum. What was it about this place that drew you to it and when did you decide you wanted to learn the stories of the people living there?

BOOWell, I first came to Mumbai in 2001, after I met my husband, Sunil, who was born in Delhi. And I would be coming to Mumbai where 60 percent of the citizens lived in slums, after intense reporting in other places and housing projects in Oklahoma City and trailer parks on the Texas border and South Boston. And so this was supposed to be my vacation, coming to Mumbai. But I just was like -- I wanted to know about the people who lived there and I wanted to know not just a -- you know, I didn't want to just know what it looked like. I wanted to know who the people are, what the people are thinking.

BOOHow are they in these slums that are surrounded by luxury hotels? Thinking, because I knew they were thinking, how can I -- they were thinking, how can I break the barrier and get into the expanding middle class? And so, for a long time, I thought, well, I can't write this because I'm not Indian. It's not, you know, it's not for me to write. But, you know, after some years, really about five or six years, my husband just started saying, why not?

BOOYou know, the kind of reporting that you do, blending -- emersion journalism and documents, investigative reporting might have some use here. And so I thought, well, I'll try it. And at the time, I wasn't really sure whether it was going to work out. But then I started going to place likes Annawadi. And the people were so amazing and I got sucked in.

NNAMDIFor those of us who've never been to Mumbai, can you describe what we'd see of Annawadi if we were to pass it by coming or going from the airport?

BOOSo you're flying down over the city and you land at the airport and you make a left-turn. And when I first came there, if you were headed, say, to the Hyatt or the Sheraton Hotel nearby, you would pass by this long wall. And the wall was filled with advertisements for a tiny floor tiles, ceramic tiles. And the wall said, Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever, Beautiful Forever.

BOOAnd there was a break in the wall. And then, through the break was this road, this craterous road and you went down it and turned a corner and then you were in the middle of this hidden slum where people were living 10 to a hut and on top of huts, outside of huts, that were held together, some of them duck tape. Some of them were made with aluminum scraps. Some of them were made with cardboard. And some, now that India was prospering, they were made of brick.

NNAMDIWe're talking with Katherine Boo. Her book is called "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity." If you'd like to join the conversation, call us 800-433-8850 is the number. How have your perceptions of India been shaped by the dueling narratives of a country on the economic rise in a country with the kind of poverty made famous by the film "Slumdog Millionaire"? 800-433-8850, you can send email to kojo@wamu.org, join by going to our website kojoshow.org or simply send us a tweet @kojoshow. It's my understanding that there is a section of the book that you could read for us.

BOOJust a paragraph.

NNAMDIPlease do so.

BOOThis paragraph shows the way a woman who you would meet in my book named Asha, who's -- Asha's a mother of three whose come to Mumbai from really devastating rural poverty. And her husband is an alcoholic and she's trying to make a better life for her three children, particularly her daughter, Manu, who is poised to become the first female college graduate in Annawadi. And this is how Asha sees the world in which she lives.

BOO"Asha hadn't, by now, seen past the obvious truth that Mumbai was a hive of hope and ambition to a profitable corollary. Mumbai was a place of festering grievance and ambient envy. Was there a soul in this enriching, unequal city who didn't blame his dissatisfaction on someone else? Wealthy citizens accused the slum dwellers of making the city filthy and unlivable, even as an oversupply of human capital kept the wages of their maids and chauffeurs low."

BOO"Slum dwellers complained about the obstacles the rich and powerful erected to prevent them from sharing in new profit. And everyone, everywhere, complained about their neighbors. But in the twenty-first-century city, fewer people joined up to take their disputes to the streets. As group identities based on caste, ethnicity, and religion gradually attenuated, anger and hope were being privatized , like so much else in Mumbai. This development increased the demand for canny mediators, human shock absorbers for the colliding, narrowly construed interests of one of the world's great cities."

NNAMDIKatherine Boo, reading from "Behind the Beautiful Forevers." You do not exactly fit the profile of the kinds of people one is likely to find in Annawadi. You're blond. You're of the lighter complexion. You must've stuck out like a sore thumb.

BOOI did.

NNAMDIBut from the perspective of a reporter, how did you go about building a level of comfort with the people you were spending time with to the point where they, like Asha, were willing to share so much with you? And how did you account for your safety while doing this?

BOOWell, I mean, how did I get to know them? It's by showing up day after day after day after day. And one of the things that happened early on is that I couldn't -- the way I work is, is to just sort of patiently follow people, go where they go, do what they do. It's not all about sticking a microphone in someone's face and saying, tell me your world view. So for a while, I couldn't find a translator who was willing to work that way or in the conditions that were so bad with the dengue fever and malaria and tuberculosis.

BOOSo I would just show up. And even though we couldn't communicate properly, I could just still watch people work. And, you know, afterward, people said that that made an impression on them, that I wasn't afraid. And I hesitate to generalize about the feelings of a diverse group of slum dwellers. And some of them found me completely ridiculous and still do, but some people then thought, well, she must be serious about trying to understand the way we're living.

NNAMDIHow different was that from doing -- you know, your husband is Indian. You mentioned that he suggested you could write about the place in a less condescending way...

BOORight.

NNAMDI...that other western journalists. And I'm thinking, look, you covered poverty in Washington, you covered poverty in Oklahoma. Here you are. Was there anything you learned about how you go about doing this here in the United States that was instructive to you in Annawadi?

BOOThe way that I go into community is not about, you know, hello, I'm here, and trying to charm people. It's going in and respecting people's intelligences and saying, I write about poverty and how people get out of it. And I don't think that the wealthier people know enough about that. And this is what I want to do. And to tell people that and to let people think it over. And whether it's in Oklahoma City or anywhere else or Mumbai, I think that people do understand that maybe if more people knew their stories, that maybe people would have a different idea of them than the usual stereotypes.

NNAMDILet me flip that coin. How was this challenge then different then from those you took on earlier in your career?

BOOWell, it was, I mean, it was different in so many ways. Chief among them, the use of the translator, that was -- I'd used a translator on the Texas-Mexico border, but this was years of working without knowing the language. And by the end, I had learned some -- I could hear, but I still didn't have the level of precision and nuance that would help me really, really get to know people. And so for the first time, I worked very, very closely with another person because often I'm just working by myself.

BOOAnd that turned out to be a wonderful thing because the young woman I worked with for years on this, who had studied sociology, became not just a translator, but a co-investigator and a critical interlocutor. And some of the things that we experienced were so emotionally upsetting that it was wonderful to -- not to just have it in my own head, but to have somebody to experience it with me and to talk about it. It was emotionally sustaining for me.

NNAMDI800-433-8850 is our number if you have questions or comments for Katherine Boo about "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity." Is it fair to say that some American audiences have fetishized poverty in the wake of the film "Slumdog Millionaire," in your view?

BOOSure. I mean, I think that there's a long history in the west of fetishizing poverty. I mean, it doesn't have to do with Danny Boyle, it goes way, way back. But I think that, you know, I think that poverty in this country and in India and elsewhere does tend to get simplified. It's gets sentimentalized, it gets sensationalized. I think that that's not particular to any country. We...

NNAMDIIndeed we had incidents of so-called slum tourism after Katrina in New Orleans. We had it in Haiti...

BOOHaiti, right.

NNAMDI...and we have it India. It wasn't more than a few years ago that the entire world developed a fascination with the India that you described in this book, Indian poverty as a result of "Slumdog Millionaire." It won the Oscar for best picture. It's my understanding that a piece that you wrote about the Mumbai premier of the film got you in trouble with local police.

BOOYeah, it got me in trouble with the local police, but I think in the end was the good thing. I had written, at the time -- I'd been working for more than a year in Annawadi at the time that "Slumdog Millionaire" premiered in Mumbai. So I just wrote about one night in the life of the workers, the real people in the slum who didn't know anything about the film and the premier and still really don't.

BOOAnd I tried to describe some of the obstacles that they faced. And of course, they weren't going on game shows and winning prizes. So an editor of a Marathi language newspaper happened to see the article and he became very excited about it because he said, this is the truth about Mumbai that we, here in India, aren't willing to face. And so he translated it in a flurry and put it in a local paper. And then I got to Annawadi the next day and people had read the New Yorker story in the local language. And not everybody could read, but the people who had read, had the experience of reading what I'd written.

BOOAnd the unfortunate part of that was that the police also learned that I was investigating a death and then they made it a little bit difficult for me after that. But in the long run, I mean, I got through that police difficulty. It ended up being important because the people at Annawadi could see that I was doing what I said I was doing. Because, you know, it was this weird thing, this woman there day and night following thieves and following kindergarten teachers. And really what was she doing?

BOOAnd this kid named Richie, who's saying --bused to be so merciless, he was like, this is the worst idea for a book I've ever heard. Who's going to read this boring stupid story? So he was always trying to help me get a better idea.

NNAMDIAnd after reporting on that premier, it enhanced your credibility with the people you were reporting on 'cause they knew that you were going to be doing what you said you were doing. If you have called, stay on the line. We're going to take a -- well, no, I'll take a phone call first before we go to break. Let's talk with Ellen in Bethesda, Md. Ellen, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

ELLENHello. I just felt moved to call to congratulate you on your work. It was so refreshing to hear someone speak who approached the story with humility. You said you weren't sure you could even do the story since you were an outsider. And it really just struck me how you went in and you approached these people, respecting their unintelligence and going to them with hope, like talking about how they could get out of their poverty.

ELLENAnd I also thought that when you said that they finally decided that they could confide in you after you going back so many times, I'm sure was just them being so awestruck at seeing how someone in your position actually cared about them. And what a huge service you did to these people even just by showing them how much you cared. And I'm just really happy to see a story come out of this from your perspective as opposed to so many people who go into a situation with their own judgments who do, as you said, sticking a microphone in someone's face and not really giving such a (word?) story.

NNAMDICare to comment, Katherine?

BOOWell, just thank you, Ellen. And one of the things in these last couple weeks I've had to talk about, I've had a microphone stuck in my face and I have to talk about it. And it's not really particularly for people who are not -- low income people are not used to -- they don't have the leisure, when they work day and night, to sit around and make well-formulated answers to questions that outsiders want to know. That's not the most pressing thing on their mind.

BOOAnd so in order to really know what people say -- I mean, people think and how they choose and decide you have to be patient.

NNAMDIGot to take a short break. Ellen, thank you very much for your call.

BOOThank you.

NNAMDIYou can call us at 800-433-8850. Have you ever read a book or an article or seen a film that helped you understand poverty in more human terms? What provided that experience for you? Call us at 800-433-8850. Send us a Tweet at kojoshow or email to kojoshow@wamu.org. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back to our conversation with Katherine Boo. She won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000 when she was writing for The Washington Post. She's now a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the book "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity." You can call us at 800-433-8850 or send email to kojo@wamu.org. Annawadi is literally surrounded by symbols of the other side of India's economic story, luxury hotels, the airplanes ferrying people in and out of the country.

NNAMDIOne of your central characters, a boy named Abdul, is trying to make life better for himself by scavenging for recycled garbage. To what degree can you describe the disconnect in the conception of opportunity, on the one hand the prosperous sections of Mumbai and on the other in Annawadi?

BOOI think that in India, as in America, often the distribution of opportunity is an insider trade. It's based on, you know, exchanging knowledge and circulating money among groups that are already privileged. And in a place like Annawadi, the place is electric with hope. There's Richie who puts it this way, he says -- he snapped at his mother one day, I'll have a -- one day I'm going to have a bathroom as big as this hut. And for people who live without toilets, bathrooms figure large.

BOOBut see, the hope is absolutely electric, but they don't have the information. And the obstacles, including corruption, are so high that it creates a sort of desperate competition between the neighbors. They look at their neighbors as holding them back. You know, if only I can collect more garbage than you, if only I can get more construction work than you, then I can get ahead.

BOOAnd I think that's, you know, that's a climate that we see in inner cities here as well, that people believe it is possible to get out of poverty to better their lives, but often they view the competition as their neighbors and that, you know, the problem, if their neighbor's not, the politics and the economics of their country in which they live.

NNAMDIYou write about Abdul's father having an irritating habit of talking about poverty like a bus you could chase after even if you kept missing it.

BOOYeah. He says it's like -- you know, he says, you know, that you can catch the bus. It's not too late, but you just have to run faster than you've ever run before in your life. The problem is that over time you get tired chasing. You can't -- you know, every morning you're chasing after the same bus and you're damaged from all this trial and all this failure. So how fast can you really run?

NNAMDIThe bus becomes a treadmill. But there also seems to be -- you mentioned corruption as an obstacle. But in an environment where there is that much corruption, it seems that corruption represents opportunity as much as it does obstacle.

BOOAbsolutely, absolutely. For Ausha (sp?) , the mother of three with an alcoholic husband, she's tried so many ways to get out of poverty. And when -- in the book she's got a new idea and it's her best idea of all. And that idea is that there's so many antipoverty schemes coming out of Delhi and -- for education, for healthcare, for micro lending. There's so many of these schemes that are supposed to help the poor and, in fact, they're being diverted and pocketed by people who are already elite.

BOOBut she thinks if I can just get a tiny bit of this antipoverty money for myself, then my daughter is -- the future of my beautiful sensitive intelligent daughter is going to be unlimited. And that's what she sets out to do is try to steal essentially -- steal antipoverty money and make it work for her one family.

NNAMDIWe'll get to that antipoverty money some more in a second, but for the time being, let's go back to the telephones. Here's Robert in Gambrels, Md. Robert, your turn.

ROBERTYes. Hello, Kojo. Huge fan, great show, fascinating topic. So thanks for having my call. You asked a question about have we experienced -- as your listeners, have we experienced works of fiction, films, commentary on poverty. And I have very little to respond to except personal experience. I just returned from Nepal a couple weeks ago. And I was visiting a slum for the first time, which I certainly am guilty of romanticizing the poverty of which and I was excited to take National Geographic-like photographs of these beautiful people.

ROBERTAnd that's a confession. I mean, it's, you know -- but what I learned was the amazing dignity of these people who lived in this village outside of Kathmandu, and the resilience and hope. And a friend of mine was -- and I hope that I'm not trying to put a plug out there, but I was visiting a friend who works on a project called Quilts for Kids...

NNAMDIYes.

ROBERT...where the members of the community make these quilts, sell them to the West and they educate a child for a year. But the comment is the poverty was absolutely unfathomable. I mean, these people were living in plastic and bamboo tents essentially, cooking indoors, no sanitation, a public well. And the hope and the spirit and the beauty of especially the young people, but certainly the elders in the community as well. And of course, there was grass and there was skimming of these funds that were coming in. And there had to be a lot of oversight managing the resources that this charity project was putting together.

ROBERTBut my experience, and very limited, was of extreme dignity and resilience as a people in a community and the love within their own community of themselves. There was no shame that I witnessed.

NNAMDIYou've raised a lot of issues. Allow me to add to them this email we got from Jack in Crystal City who says, "I'm greatly familiar with Katherine's work, but I haven't yet had the chance to read this book about India. I look forward to it. But I think journalists like her are so important because they're able to find dignity and humanity in stories where many people aren't willing to go, or places where some people turn away from looking at them.

NNAMDII'm reminded by the work Studds Stuckle (sp?) did about working people. It wasn't about an underclass, per se, but he clearly saw the dignity in people who were doing everything they could to make it in this country. We're sore for journalists like Katherine and Studds. Now please thank her for what she does." Well, you've said it already yourself, Jack. Thank you.

BOOThank you, Jack.

NNAMDIPlease respond to those two comments.

BOOWell, I think that part of the problem with the terms that we use to talk about poverty are we use terms like underclass, we use phrases like stuck in poverty, mired in poverty. But it doesn't have a real relation to how poverty and opportunity are actually experienced by people in it. And which it's not still, it's not static, it's not little portraits of children with flies in their eyes. It's incredibly volatile and people in those situations are making decisions where the stakes are enormous.

BOOAnd they're making the decisions with fewer informational resources and they're improvising. They're reinventing themselves because particularly in the global market economy where you've got capital, you know, moving country to country so quickly, the ability to analyze and choose and decide is a crucial skill for all of us. But you see it in, you know, you see it in abundance in these low income communities. And I think that the terms that we use, that sort of the conceptions we have were -- they were probably outdated in the beginning, but they're certainly outdated now.

NNAMDIRobert, thank you very much for your call. There's another aspect of this, I guess, I'd like to get at. It's really hard to compare these situations, but I'm wondering the extent to which -- when we look at poverty here in the United States and we think of poverty, is there any way of trying to compare the kind of poverty you see in Annawadi with the kind of poverty you have covered here in the United States? Is there any single yardstick we can use?

BOOWell, I mean, one of the things that I have been in my own work in the United States, focused on how different social, you know, how ideas in places like Washington, to get people out of poverty don't actually appear at the same on the ground in low income communities. And that's absolutely the same in both countries, is that there's a lot of plans made in the elite circles that just don't have anything to do with the way that people are actually living. Excuse me.

BOOBut one of the things that I do appreciate in the United States, now more than I did is that the relative functionality of the criminal justice system, the fact that even the police stations in many low income communities are not nice places to be, still there is -- that when somebody's a victim of a crime in a bad neighborhood, they will often call 911. And they won't feel that the police and the system will be out to victimize them again.

BOOIn India, the criminal justice system is so dysfunctional and so exploitative and so disinterested in even the murders of low income people that for anyone to call for help is to risk their own livelihood. And that's an extremely pernicious situation. So there's certain aspects of -- there's certain institutions that we have that I feel more appreciative now.

NNAMDIHere is Molly in Arlington, Va. Molly, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

MOLLYHi, thank you very much. I'm really interested in how you were able to engage in the discussion of poverty with Indians of other higher economic means while you were there. My experience, I was in India for a year and (unintelligible) was that talking -- people can be very defensive. And I found that the best way I could relate was to talk about poverty in my own country. And how did you sort of get past that barrier and not have people sort of wonder why you can -- their problems and not your own country's problems?

BOOIt was something that I worried about a great deal. And, you know, if I had been writing only in the United States about the wondrous American assistance of opportunity...

NNAMDIThe streets paved with gold.

BOORight, right, or Lindsay Lohan or something, I mean, and I had then decided, ah, Indian poverty's hot. Let me look at that. I think that, you know, people could really have said, what is this person doing here? But, I mean, all I could say is that this is the reason I do journalism. This is my lifelong work. And it seemed to be -- and I think my husband, again, felt the same way, that it was even more patronizing to be in a society and not ask the kinds of questions that meant so much to me.

BOOAnd as for people, you know, people not wanting to talk about it in these elite circles, well, I mean, people in elite circles in the United States don't relish talking about some of the issues that I bring up. I mean, people don't want to talk about abuse and neglect and covered up deaths in group homes for the developmentally disabled in Washington, D.C. I mean, these are not subjects that make you popular at a dinner table necessarily, but they're still subjects that I think are important to cover.

NNAMDIMolly, thank you very much for your call. We got an email from Devin who says, "I'm a doctoral science student in political science at Georgetown University. I study politics, rebellion and social mobilization in India and I'm preparing to conduct field research there. Do residents of Annawadi vote? What are their connections to the political system and political actors? Do they connect their existing opportunities for political representation to finding ways to access and create better economic and social opportunities?"

BOOThat is a great question. India, of course, is the world's largest democracy and the most complex. And here's the huge difference between the Indian democracy and ours. In India the poor vote. Now often the elite don't but the poor recognize that this is the most important power that they have and they take that very, very seriously. And once I started investigating, in Annawadi what I found was so striking, which was that people who had migrated to Mumbai from other Indian states would try to vote. And their applications -- their papers would get lost. They would be denied to vote.

BOOMeanwhile, I found that people who were born in the state and were more likely to vote for Shiv Sena, which was the political party in power, some of them had two votes. They had two voting numbers from different neighborhoods. So when you look closely at it, there are many people -- there were people who had spent seven years trying to register to vote and these were people from disliked outside groups. So I think that's a subject that cries out for more reporting. And I'd done, you know, as much of it as I could, but I really struck.

BOOIn the course of my reporting, I did door-to-door surveys in the slum just to try to figure out what -- to make sure that I was getting the whole residence concern. And it was just so striking to me that again and again and again people in the world's largest democracy weren't able to get (unintelligible) .

NNAMDIWanted to talk about what seems to be the obsession with politicians worldwide today with the middle class. I'll start with playing a clip from a recent "60 Minutes" piece about the importance of gold to Indian societies. Here's the clip.

NARRATORWith India, a rising economic power house, the number of rich and middle-class families now outnumber the poor.

NNAMDIThat seemed to be almost the rationale for doing the piece, the fact that the number of rich and middle-class now outnumber the poor. And listening to the political dialogue as it takes place in this country, and reading a review of your book by an Indian politician, one gets the impression that there is now so much of focus on the middle-class because after all, the middle-class tend to make up a larger swath of these societies, and they do indeed vote, that one gets the impression that even politically, the poor have become even less important.

BOOI think that so much of that has to do with -- I mean, it's not the poor who are tweeting and taking to the public square and demanding accountability, demanding -- you know, the poor are working day and night to try to figure out how not to be poor and how to, you know, get their -- give their children a better life. And so what you have is you have political attention really focused right now in many countries on the middle-class.

BOOAlso, I think it has to do with the fact that because of the economy for instance, here, especially that the middle-class feels poor. So it's a time when everybody feels like they're suffering a little, and that doesn't really open up the human heart in most cases unfortunately. My mother, you know, talks about a time in her childhood when everybody was poor and there was lot of empathy, and I'm really struck that that's not necessarily what I sense.

NNAMDIGot to take a short break. If you have called, stay on the line. We will get to your call. When we come back, we'll continue our conversation with Katherine Boo. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her latest book is called "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity." 800-433-8850 is the number to call, or you can send email to kojo@wamu.org. Send us a tweet @kojoshow. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back to our conversation with Katherine Boo. She is the author of "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity." She's a staff writer for The New Yorker who has won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000. At that point, she was writing for the Washington Post. She joins us in studio. Joining us now by phone is Sanjay Puri, chairman of the U.S. India Political Action Committee. Sanjay Puri, thank you so much for joining us.

MR. SANJAY PURIThank you, Kojo. Good to talk to you.

NNAMDINice talking to you. I just made reference, Sanjay, to the "60 Minutes" piece about the importance of gold in Indian societies, particularly at weddings. I was struck by the difference between the images in India that I saw there and those that Katherine describes in Annawadi where she says, quoting here, "fortune is derived from accidents and catastrophes avoided. The train that hadn't hit you, the malaria you hadn't caught." Sanjay, how do you see it?

PURIWell, you know, she has obviously written a very good piece. You know, there's actually two Indias as far as, you know, I see . I've been going to India almost, you know, three, four times a year for the past, I don't know, 10, 15 years, and really it's the India where, you know, you see the five-star hotels, and you see all the affluence and billion-dollar homes, and then there is that India which she talks about also. You just have to go further away from the large cities, and it still has a lot of challenges.

PURIIt has, you know, there is poverty and there is illiteracy, but I think what is happening is people are trying to see how we can bring these two Indias together where, you know, slowly there's a merge of them, and that's where the government keeps talking about inclusive growth. So I think that's a challenge that India faces, that are really two Indias out there.

NNAMDIIn your work as Chairman of the U.S. India Political Action Committee, it involves connecting people in power in the United States to issues that are important to Indians and to Indian-Americans. How much of it involves helping people better understand the challenges in places like Annawadi, because what we are understanding from globalization is that it has been a boon for business, and to some extent expanding the middle class in these countries, but not doing a great deal for the poor. How do you address those issues in your work here?

PURIWell, you know, there are many ways. Obviously when we take delegations, we take political leaders, we take -- we've taken governors, straight missions to India, and we absolutely emphasize that besides meeting this corporate, you know, CEOs, besides, you know, having this big reception that sort of -- you really have to get out and it's not talking or doing a slum tour or some of these things which are really sensitive, culturally sensitive, but really get into seeing what an average person there lives, or go a public school rather than some of these elite, you know, fancy schools because everybody here talks about IAT, IAM, et cetera.

PURIOr go to a public hospital to really see what an average Indian's life is like. So we've done that every time, so that's creating awareness at a, you know, political level, and hopefully trying to make them aware of the challenges that exist besides obviously the great progress. I mean, India has made a lot of progress, so that's not to take anything away from them, but still, great challenges lie ahead.

NNAMDITo what extent does a narrative like the one that Katherine is presenting not only challenge the stories that people are reading in Thomas Friedman columns about India's rapidly expanding tech sector and its economic potential but to what extent are there some in Indian society who are uncomfortable with these stories getting the kind of exposure they are getting because they feel it takes them back to an image that they've been trying to escape?

PURIWell, you know, it's a thin line, Kojo. When I came here 30 years ago, we were used to -- basically, they knew when I was coming there, they would be saying, talk about snake charmers and the poverty and things of that nature. And now, the past 10 years, everybody talks about IT and how India's growing and booming et cetera. But the narrative lies somewhere in the middle of it all, and yes, there is a sensitivity in India because they believe that all the world keeps just talking about is, you know, poverty, and some of it is obviously a perception issue because all the things that newspapers would talk about where, you know, poverty, illiteracy, and, you know, those kinds of things.

PURIBut I think the first thing that India also has to do is accept the fact that there is poverty, there is illiteracy, there is a lot of difference and a growing economic gap because as people will tell you , if you want to get a solution, fist you accept that there is a problem. But it is a sensitive issue across the board because, you know, you have to phrase it right and say it right. So it is a pretty sensitive issue, but I think the truth is somewhere in the middle of, you know, land of snake charmers or land of IT parks with high growth.

NNAMDIKatherine Boo, so much of what American audiences learn about places like India often comes from the wonkish world of NGOs, non-governmental organizations, places that recommend policies, bombard you statistics data. Not only do you seem to be doing the opposite hear by presenting a world in purely human terms, but you're also willing to suggest that NGOs and charities can also be a source of corruption and a contributor to the problems. How so?

BOOWell, I think this begins with a problem that we have in writing about -- often about poverty. Often as journalists we hook up with an NGO and then the NGO goes and he picks the success story, you know, the best thing, and then we write about that. But what I try to do in being in a community in any, you know, whether it's in the United States of America, is to go in unaligned. I have no relationships with NGOs that -- you know, and so I start following how charity is actually experienced on the ground, and so often it's much, much more complex than we realize.

BOOI talk in the book about a nun who worked for Mother Theresa who then becomes a source of -- becomes corrupt, and ends up essentially taking donations from corporations and then selling them to the most poor children in the slum including expired jam and ketchup packages that get served at hotels. So -- but then you have more complicated -- you have NGOs that are doing some good and doing some that's not so good.

BOOIn a way, I feel that if we had a more complex view -- a nuanced view of what is possible in charity, we'd be better off, and also a sense -- my own sense that philanthropy cannot provide everything that people need. I don't want a philanthropy to be responsible for whether my drinking water is going to give me cholera. I'd like a functioning accountable government to do that for me.

NNAMDISanjay, I've seen debates in Haiti. There obviously are more than debates going on in Egypt, and I'm sure there are debates going on in Indi about NGOs and the kind of influence they sometimes wield in the countries there they're trying to make a difference. Care to comment on that at all?

PURIWell, you know, I agree to a certain extent that NGOs, you know, like everything else, like companies, there are the good ones, and then there are some probably not so good ones. And in India, you know, NGOs have become sometimes a wake-up for corporations and they become sometimes a wake-up for, you know, politicians too. So I think Katherine is absolutely right, is really go the people to understand so that your view is not really filtered, but, you know, India is a complex country.

PURII mean, there are no, you know, it's not all black and white. There's many shades of gray and that's the challenge that, you know, people have in trying to figure out because we are looking at it from an American perspective in terms of NGOs, or we're looking at from, you know, as she pointed out, the poverty, you know, they all talk about the success stories, but there are obviously some good ones and there are some not so good ones out there.

NNAMDISanjay Puri, thank you so much for joining us.

PURIThank you, Kojo.

NNAMDISanjay Puri is the chairman of the U.S. India Political Action Committee. Katherine Boo, your book is missing the chapter or section that is a staple of so many non-fiction books, the this-is-where-I'm-going-to-present-you-all-my-potential-solutions chapter. Is that a reflection of how you see your job as a journalist and story teller?

BOOThat's right. I think that I have a healthy respect for the Division of Labor in this regard, that I think that there are people in this world who are way better than me at devising a sensitive policy, and about creating an infrastructure of accountability. But what I feel that I can do is I can help to bring two people like that a more complicated picture of what it's actually like, how things actually work on the ground for people, and if I can do that, then I feel like I've done my job. But you don't want me to write policy, Kojo, I wouldn't know how to.

NNAMDISame here. Malvey (sp?) you're on the air. Go ahead, please. Hi Malvey, are you there?

MALVEYYes. Yes. I didn't know. Hi. Katherine, first of all I want to thank you and salute you for shedding light on how the poor live, and...

BOOThank you, Malvey.

MALVEY...how they struggle, and how complex their situation is, and often have so little hope, and a second compliment and then I come to two quick questions.

BOOOkay. Yeah.

MALVEYNot only do you write about us and make us think about it, but you write so beautifully. I have only (unintelligible) quickly seen the excerpt in the New York Review of Books which came out last week...

BOOMm-hmm.

MALVEY...and I bought it a couple of days ago, and of course, I will buy the book, but it's so beautifully written. You make it all so palpable and so my smaller question is, since I was left hanging with poor Abdul, who turns himself into the police, will he survive? And the second question related to this question is, as a result of your writing, either here in the United States or now in Mumbai, have you seen personally how maybe true your being there and questioning -- have you seen that some people really did break out of this cycle of poverty?

NNAMDIHere's Katherine Boo.

BOOWell, first of all, I need you to read and find out what happened to...

NNAMDII was about to say the same. No shortcuts here, Malvey.

BOOYeah. Yeah. Who's a fascinating and special kid, but I will say, when you compliment the writing, and thank you for that, but I want to just say that for me, I believe that writing happens when you've got the reporting that undergirds it, when you've spent that kind of time that you can, you know, I don't think it's just about stringing pretty words together. I think that for me the best writing comes -- in non-fiction, comes when -- from people who's just reported the heck out of what they're doing.

BOOAnd in terms of do some people get out of poverty, which brings me back to Sanjay's point, which is that yes, they do, and so often when we talk about the globalized economy, there's two camps. There's people who are saying absolutely nothing has changed, and then everything has changed, and it's somewhere in the middle, and I think what's really interesting, and what I try to explore in my book is that the ways out of poverty that you might expect, they may turn out to be dead ends, but for instance, anti-poverty corruption proved in the book to be a really great way out of poverty for individual families.

BOOSo, you know, it's just not -- on the ground, people have a different sense of what the real social springboards are, and they know that they're not quite the social springboards that are conventionally understood to be effective.

NNAMDIMalvey, thank you very much for your call. We're running out time, but Donna in Alexandria, Va., can you say what you're gonna say in ten seconds or less?

DONNAYes. Hello, Katherine, it's Donna Holmes...

BOOHi.

DONNA...the mother of Christine.

BOOOh, hi Donna.

DONNAYes, how are you?

BOOGood.

DONNAI've got the book and I've gotten to the point where the kid's in jail too, and it's just -- I'm trying not to turn the page to find the end.

NNAMDIAnd apparently, Donna's daughter Christine was in class with you at some point.

BOOYeah. Yeah. At T.C. Williams High School.

NNAMDIThank you so much for your call, Donna. Katherine Boo is the author of "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity." She's a staff writer for The New Yorker. Katherine Boo, thank you so much for joining us.

BOOKojo, it was an honor. Thanks.

NNAMDIThe honor was mine. Thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.