A Great Deal Of What Is Presumed

Rich Indians Typically Tried To Work Around A Dysfunctional Government. Private Security Was Hired, City Water Was Filtered, Private School Tuitions Were Paid. Such Choices Had Evolved Over The Years Into A Principle: The Best Government Is The One That Gets Out Of The Way. The Attacks On The Taj And The Oberoi, In Which Executives And Socialites Died, Had Served As A Blunt Correction. The Wealthy Now Saw That Their Security Could Not Be Requisitioned Privately. They Were Dependent On The Same Public Safety System That Ill Served The Poor.

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 Boat Goes West And You Congratulate Yourself, 'what A Navigator I Am!' And Then The Wind Blows You East.

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 Because People With Power Have A Better Sense Of What’s Happening To People Who Have None.

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 Few Residents Trapped Rats And Frogs And Fried Them For Dinner. A Few Ate The Scrub Grass At The Sewage Lake Edge. And These Individuals, Miserable Souls, Thereby Made An Inestimable Contribution To Their Neighbors. They Gave Those Slum Dwellers Who Didn't Fry Rats And Eat Weeds A Sense Of Their Upward Mobility.

A Great Deal Of What Is Presumed To Be Intractable Or Inevitable In This World Doesn't Strike Me That Way At All.