Occupation: Journalist Birth: August 12, 1964
A great deal of what is presumed to be intractable or inevitable in this world doesn't strike me that way at all..
In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down..
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….
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 ….
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….
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….
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….
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….
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….
I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences..
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….
.. becoming attached to a country involves pressing, uncomfortable questions about justice and opportunity for its least powerful citizens..
...much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said..
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….
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….
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 ….
I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is..
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….
Rich Indians typically tried to work around a dysfunctional government. Private security was hired, city water was filtered, private school tuitions ….
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….
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….