As India began to prosper, old ideas about accepting the life assigned by one’s caste or one’s divinities were yielding to a belief in earthly reinvention. Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past. Abdul’s brother Mirchi did not intend to sort garbage. He envisioned wearing a starched uniform and reporting to work at a luxury hotel. He’d heard of waiters who spent all day putting toothpicks into pieces of cheese, or aligning knives and forks on tables. He wanted a clean job like that. “Watch me!” he’d once snapped at their mother. “I’ll have a bathroom as big as this hut!”

— Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, Sunil Malhotra (Narrator)