As a reporter, you know the tropes of how stories on poverty work in any country. A reporter will go to an NGO and say, "Tell me about the good work ….

Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions ….

In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down..

...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said..

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 t….

Don't correct me, you don't have any rights over me." "What kind of life is this? So I sit at home , entirely dependent on this man, and then it turn….

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 polyu….

My job is to lay it out clearly, not to give my policy prescriptions.Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be….

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 mom….

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 t….

A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all..

Everyone in Annawadi talks like this: 'Oh, I will make my child a doctor, a lawyer, and he will make us rich'. It's vanity, nothing more. Your little….

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 do….

I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences..

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 dra….

I was spending a lot of time in Mumbai after I met my husband, who is Indian, and while parts of the city were prospering like crazy, I couldn't quit….

In my kind of reporting work, you don't parachute in after some big, terrible event, which is important and has to be covered, but offers only a glim….

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them..

.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens..

People naturally long for a bit of the wealth that is whorling all around them, and if the work and education available to them won't get them closer….

When I pick a story, I'm very much aware of the larger issues that it's illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about ….