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 tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is..

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

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

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….

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….

One chronicler writes of an area of India during the end of the 20th century: Almost no-one in this slum was poor by Indian benchmarks. ... True, a ….

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….

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 ….

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 ….

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….

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….

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….

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

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….

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abjec….

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

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….

I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe..

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….

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