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