Behind the Beautiful Forevers读后感10篇(5)

　　Unlike her husband, Sunil Khilnani, who reserves a measure of affection for the Nehruvian project of state-led development, Boo keeps none. In Boo’s rendering, the state is not only incompetent – failing to provide the basics of a decent life to vast numbers of citizens – it is wholly predatory. As people learn to survive the blows and betrayals of this rapacious state, their expectations as well as “innate capacities for moral action,” are altered. Boo tells us that in Mumbai, a “hive of hope and ambition,” there is no dearth of young people who believe in “New Indian miracles” – that they can go from “zero to hero fast.” In Annawadi, however, a series of encounters with greedy, ruthless government officials ensures that such dreams are crushed, even the modest one of “becoming something different.” A boy, wrongfully accused of murder, is reconciled that the Indian criminal justice is a “market like garbage,” where “innocence and guilt [can] be bought and sold like a kilo of polyutherane bags.” His mother, exhausted by her tussle with a “justice system so malign,” is one of the many adults who keep walking “as a bleeding waste-picker slowly dies on the roadside.”

　　If Boo’s aim is to shatter the smugness of those who still believe that India is “shining,” she succeeds (as she should). But in a country where corruption, poverty and inequality are the subjects of heated and continuous debate, what are the politics of this powerfully written and slickly produced book？ Where does it fit, in the larger conversation？ Surely, the question is a fair one of a book that makes such a strong claim to rigorously documenting the lives of the poor？

　　An evening with a family friend served up a clue. In the midst of complaining about the government’s flagging commitment to reforms and our waiter’s lazy ways, this friend, an ex IMF official based in Washington, delivered a rave review of Boo’s book. I was taken aback, as much as I would be if Mamata Didi suddenly declared a love of Prada shoes. I pushed him on why he had liked it. His answer, quite simply, was that it was beautifully written (which it is), and that he had learned a lot about Annawadi from the book. It was tempting to take these words at face value. It was perhaps wrong of me to expect purism. In the face of brilliant writing, surely even a doctrinaire IMFer could make peace with what the book makes obvious: that “trickle down” has not worked. Yet the incident opened a window to what I has sensed as troubling about the book, and my nagging discomfort with the near-unanimous praise it has elicited, especially for its its courage.

　　The truth is that it is no longer terribly risky to challenge the idea of a “shining” India. When my late father, Arjun Sengupta, released a report suggesting that 77 percent of Indians live on less than Rs. 20 a day, he was duly punished, albeit relatively mild Government of India style. The commission he chaired was not extended for a second term, his phone calls were not returned, and he spent the last months of his life distressed that his work was being ignored, even by the press. But the country’s mood has changed considerably since then. After more than three years of sagging growth, massive corruption, shrinking investment, and shockingly poor records on health and education, only a handful of ideologues will insist that India is still doing brilliantly (and my father’s report – once dismissed by Mr. Chidambaram as a “myth” – is back in circulation, even within the government). For the garden variety neoliberal, the argument has shifted quite noticeably, from celebrating India’s “shining,” to cataloguing the causes of its all-too-palpable dulling. The lead story in a recent issue of The Economist, titled “How India is Losing its Magic,” is but one indicator.

　　In fact, the major disagreements today are not over whether something has gone wrong, but about why it has gone wrong. Of course, neoliberals have a ready diagnosis: “governance failures” are destroying the effects of sound economic policy and youthful, entrepreneurial drive. (The Economist makes this point with characteristic self-assurance. India is “losing its magic” because of “the country’s desperate politics,” and “the state, still huge and crazy after all these years.”) Examples abound of floundering government-funded social programs and botched anti-poverty schemes. Even corruption, now undeniable in its mammoth presence and disastrous effects, is seen as a vestige of the old state, a stubborn ancien regime that has refused to keep pace with the liberalizing economy. The attendant preｓｃｒｉｐｔions are to be easily deduced: scale back the state as much as possible, dismantle its unworkable social programs, and slap on an Ombudsman to keep wayward civil servants in line.

　　To be fair, Boo offers no “solutions.” A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist knows better than to swat the reader with an overt “message.” Yet with its exclusive preoccupation with government failure – Boo does not sift through the public records of international organizations or large corporations, after all – the book’s subtle alignment with the neoliberal narrative is unmistakable. For a globally feted work that does in fact offer a sensitive portrayal of the aspirations, disappointments, and “deep, idiosyncratic intelligences of the poor,” this is most worrying. Some of the most pressing struggles today, for the poor, and more importantly, by the poor, are to increase public funding for health and education, to universalize the reach of social security measures, and to expand the ambit of the legal system in order to secure recognition and entitlements from the state. …… 此处隐藏：3687字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……