The Beautiful Forever Wall Symbol Analysis

The slum Annawadi is next to the international airport in Mumbai, but the poverty of Annawadi is hidden from the rich airport clientele thanks to a concrete wall pasted with advertisements for ceramic tiles that will stay “beautiful forever.” Katherine Boo’s mission as a journalist is to get behind that wall and inform the rest of the world about the real situation for much of the Indian population. The ad on the wall is an obvious exaggeration, as no tiles could actually stay beautiful forever. Similarly, the Indian government has projected the false narrative that all of the problems of poverty and slums are in the past. While India’s economy has improved, there are still large populations living in temporary housing without permanent jobs, such as those who live in Annawadi behind this wall. The wall allows India to perpetuate a lie, hiding the living conditions of India’s poor from the tourists who come in to the Mumbai airport.

In addition to hiding India’s poverty from the rest of the world, the wall keeps the residents of Annawadi from being able to join the modern society of the more cosmopolitan India. Slum residents are not allowed to go into the airport and are even discouraged from looking over the wall to see what people at the airport are doing. Thus, the wall symbolizes both the inadequacy of the Indian government’s narrative of progress that it sells to the world, and the barrier that still exists for the poor in India, who are not given access to India’s new economic momentum and social mobility. By the end of the novel, the wall has been torn down in order for the airport to expand. With the wall down and the slum, an obstacle to the airport’s expansion, in full view of passengers, Boo suggests that city officials, and the rest of the world, will be forced to reckon with the slum residents as India continues to develop in the future.