Learn about Kids: Katherine Boo: Slum dweller

Katherine Boo won a Pulitzer for writing about the poor and vulnerable people. He spent three years in a slum in Mumbai for his new book Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Why bother, if she thinks that all he can do is "small differences"?

reputation in journalism are not made in the report ordinary lives. Even George Orwell so often known for his writings on the war for The Road to Wigan Pier, his classic work on poverty in the north of England. The stars are mostly those who break the news: I think Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of Watergate, Anna Politkovskaya Putin's Russia, Nick Davies against the News of the World

American journalist Katherine Boo

decided early on that it would be a different path. Once and only once they have agreed to write about life in the summit., In 1993 as a reporter for the Washington Post, has been commissioned to write a magazine profile on the new vice-president Al Gore

Then he felt was unnecessary. "I'm tired of obsessed with the characters," she says when we meet in London. "I think there are many people who want to do this kind of work, and are very good at it. Believe that social problems are a kind of things that decent people are graduating many. In journalism, if things get really hot, which is where you have to do - in the White House - and it's a shame "

Boo

Then in his late 20s, he returned to his vocation: writing the lives of the poorest people in America. He spent months, even years, after listening, and discover how they lived, especially in the wake of welfare reforms of the Clinton administration.

new

sometimes delivered: the end of 1990, his research on the care of handicapped persons exposed a large number of unexplained deaths, and earned him the Pulitzer Prize. But more often, the story lies in the careful accumulation of detail on how social policy plays this or that in the lives of ordinary people, mostly women. Marriage Cure, writing for the New Yorker in 2003, is a shining example, full of insight and stating the difficulties encountered by the two humiliating African American women participating in a program sponsored by the Government of marriage.

now 48 and a senior editor of The New Yorker magazine, Boo has just written his first book. In compact 250 pages, behind the beautiful Forevers is a small masterpiece of documentary storytelling. In its issue of poverty, his meticulous research (she said that the first six months of the matter was "absolutely nothing" - a clear example of the commitment in question), and that great gift of Boo sympathy, the book seems obvious after a successful career. But the setting is a dramatic departure: writing, moved to India, where he spent much of the 2008-2010 period in the slums of Mumbai called Annawadi which is in the shadow of City Airport

Boo started going to India in 2004 after her marriage to Sunil Khilnani academic, who worked in Washington when they met, but now is the director of the Institute of India Kings College London. Initially cautious about whether an American journalist of one of the most prestigious magazines in the world, be considered acceptable channels tales of poverty in the developing world - the Indian sociology graduate hired as a translator shared his doubts - Boo felt unable to resist the challenge lay, and dug in.

Annawadi not asleep, but there was drama filled time she stuck around until 4am. His days had no rhythm or purpose in the beginning. It just happened and see what happened.

She was alone at first, take the time to find translators who could tolerate the conditions. "They do not want to stay in the room, or if you prefer to stand at the door, and that people feel uncomfortable, and it was time for trial and error," she said. "It was quite reasonable that many people do not want to do this work."

has never been afraid of rats, whose bites marked bodies of children and sometimes exploited by worms? "I'm not worried about tuberculosis was a concern: .. There are many people who have spent time with stories that had more sick and died But if you're really curious, do not dwell on what many

"It was nice to fall into the lake of sewage," says coldly, "but at the same time, I did not think it was stuff petrochemical until falls, so it was something learned. "

There were times when I thought about quitting, as he had done in a previous book project, especially after the sudden death of several children he knew in the neighborhood - Kalou, Sanjay Meena - left her upset and depressed. Instead, led by a former journalist friend, who said to take their socks, she continued to haunt the authorities for an explanation of the reasons for the murder Kalu on the site of the airport does not been studied properly after stopping Abdul and his family accused in the first pages of Fatima neighbor dramatic inciting suicide.

She attended most of the events described in the book, but not the self-immolation of Fatima, and the spectacle of an ugly old garbage collector hit by a car and ignored by passers-by all he moaned and cried in before dying. The book is full of violence, especially beatings by the police, by the fathers upon the children, husbands over wives and siblings. Despair is caused by a beating that after she refused to cook an omelette, Meena leads adolescents to eat rat poison and kill.

But Boo is not the time for the cliché that life is cheap in India. Instead, he finds moral sensibilities pummeled by fear of corrupt authority. Annawadians for any recourse to the police or the courts, even a doctor or a local politician, ends in disaster, as demonstrated by their use Boo thousands of public records and hours of testimony. The culture of corruption is so entrenched, so committed professional scruples not to turn, even when help is desperately needed. Everyone is on hold.

Worried that offers a hint of despair?

"I'm sure are great attention by doctors, and it would be in a public hospital to have someone come and be beautiful and loving, but it is fiction and can not report what I saw. Already whether in India or the United States, all you can do is put on. You can not control what people will do with their hardware, and I do great pretensions. believe it is congenital problem with journalism exaggerate the difference we make. We are small differences. "But I think the alternative is worse. Unwritten about it, then there is no chance [change anything]. Typing on it, there is a small possibility . offer optimism that if you have any of these questions, then policymakers will take notice. believe that intelligent people think about these things, and do not think I'm the only person who cares. "

Boo had no elite formation of many of his peers. She worked as a secretary for two years after high school, and went to three universities, starting in the evening, before being transferred to Barnard. She worked as a newspaper typist, and asked an internship after hearing a radio editor.

From the beginning leaned Social Affairs. "There were certainly times when I was aware of people prefer to do other things," he recalls. "Editors of fashion magazines say, 'Oh, you're a good writer, why not make some thing for us and why not interview this luminaire Washington? "