## Metadata - Author: [[Katherine Boo]] - Full Title: Behind the Beautiful Forevers - Category: #books ## Highlights - 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. ([Location 372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X7JO&location=372)) - The concrete plant and all the other construction brought more work to this airport boom-town. Bad lungs were a toll you paid to live near progress. ([Location 394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X7JO&location=394)) - A few weeks ago, Abdul had seen a boy’s hand cut clean off when he was putting plastic into one of the shredders. The boy’s eyes had filled with tears but he hadn’t screamed. Instead he’d stood there with his blood-spurting stump, his ability to earn a living ended, and started apologizing to the owner of the plant. “Sa’ab, I’m sorry,” he’d said to the man in white. “I won’t cause you any problems by reporting this. You will have no trouble from me.” ([Location 406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X7JO&location=406)) - 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 largest cities. ([Location 460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X7JO&location=460)) - Asha had always been more practical than ideological, and considered no financial opportunity too small. “Why do you care if other people call us misers?” she asked her children. As they said in her village, drops of rain fill the lake. ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X7JO&location=498)) - 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. ([Location 580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X7JO&location=580)) - In an effort to ensure that women had a significant role in the governance of India, the political parties were required to put up only female candidates for certain elections. The last time Ward 76 had an all-female ballot, Corporator Subhash Sawant had put up his housemaid. The maid had won, and he had kept running the ward. Asha thought that he might just pick her to run in the next all-female election, since his new maid was a deaf-mute—ideal for keeping his secrets, less so for campaigning. ([Location 592](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X7JO&location=592)) - 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. Several dozen parents in the slum were getting by on roti and salt in order to pay private school tuition. ([Location 1059](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004J4X7JO&location=1059))