Corruption as a Difficulty in Everyday Annawadian Life In Katherine Boo’s novel Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity we are thrown into a slum in Mumbai, Annawadi and are shown that corruption is an undeniable difficulty that the Annawadians face in their everyday lives. “For every two people in Annawadi inching up, there was one in a catastrophic plunge” (24) the people of Annawadi are in such a state because of all the corruption. As soon as they get ahead there’s someone there to remind them where they belong, living their lives barely scraping by in the slums. The corruption in Mumbai has become the status quo, denying citizens of even their basic rights making everyday life a difficulty. Early on in the novel Katherine Boo shows us that corruption is an everyday difficulty that many of the people from the slums of Mumbai face. Mr. Kamble, a man living in the Annawadi slum, has a bad heart and needs a heart valve replacement in order to get his job back with the sanitation department. He goes to one of Mumbai’s public hospitals where the operation of a heart valve replacement should cost very little but “the hospital surgeons wanted under-the-table money. Sixty thousand rupees, said the surgeon at Sion Hospital. The doctor at Cooper Hospital wanted more” (24). Mr. Kamble would have been able to go back to work and provided for his family if these doctors would have been doing their jobs and not trying to take advantage of a man in desperate times. Mr. Kamble did everything he could to try and raise the money for his surgery: he took out loans, begged on the streets, asked his friends for donations, but in the end he wasn’t able to raise the amount the doctors had asked for which eventually killed him. Mr. Kamble died because of the severity of corruption that these people face in their everyday lives, if a doctor would