But something he’d come to realize on the roof, leaning out, thinking about what would happen if he leaned too far, was that a boy’s life could still matter to himself.
Sunil and Abdul sat together more often than before, but when they spoke, it was with the curious formality of people who shared the understanding that much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said.
Your little boat goes west and you congratulate yourself, “What a navigator I am!” And then the wind blows you east.
But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.
Though Abdul had been afraid of ghosts as most Annawadi boys, these reports did no disturb him. Being terrorized by living people seemed to have diminished his fear of the dead.
In Delhi, politicians and intellectuals privately bemoaned the “irrationality” of the uneducated Indian masses, but when the government itself provided false answers to its citizens’ urgent concerns, rumor and conspiracy took wing. Sometimes, the conspiracies became a consolation for loss.
But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.
I’m useless when I meet writers I love – I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.
I think it’s this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.
One thing that was very clear to me is that the young people in a place like Annawadi aren’t tripping on caste the way their parents are. They know their parents have these old views.
When I’m engaged in a story my health is not a big deal, but when I’m not doing anything, if you sit me down, I can get tied up in my own medical dramas. So I much prefer to work.
A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn’t strike me that way at all.
We often have an exaggerated sense of what nonprofits and governments are doing to help the poor, but the really inspiring thing is how much the poor are doing to help themselves.
It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.
What you don’t want is always going to be with you What you want is never going to be with you Where you don’t want to go, you have to go And the moment you think you’re going to live more, you’re going to die.
I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.
The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.
A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.
In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.