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 are doing to help themselves.

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.

In any country, corruption tends to increase when more respectable means of social advancement break down.

I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.

I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.

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 quite make out how the new wealth had changed the prospects of the majority of city residents who lived in slums. So after a few years I stopped wondering and started reporting.

But if writing about people who are not yourself is illegitimate, then the only legitimate work is autobiography; and as a reader and a citizen, I don’t want to live in that world.