“There is the burden of being homeless and the burden of being judged for it.” — Saumya Roy on poverty in America

How does the world look at America in the MAGA age? This is our third conversation drawn from How We See It, a collection of essays about America from the excellent new publication The Dial. In the first, The Dial’s Paris-based editor Madeleine Schwartz offered a very French version about the oddities of Trump’s America. In the second, the Turkish novelist and commentator Kaya Genç gave us his view from Istanbul. Today, we have a take on America from the Indian-born Saumya Roy, Al Jazeera’s San Francisco correspondent and the author of Castaway Mountain, a book about the wastepickers of her hometown Mumbai.

Saumya Roy’s inside-out America is the one glimpsed from the back of a San Francisco cab, whose Indian driver told her he’d walked here from Mumbai. In her Dial essay, Roy compares the poverty of her hometown, Mumbai — the subject of Castaway Mountain — with the homelessness outside that San Francisco cab. The comparison isn’t quite what you’d expect. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing — a hundred thousand street people against San Francisco’s eight thousand. But in Mumbai Roy finds a social kind of poverty, whereas in San Francisco it’s atomized and isolating. In the land of personal responsibility, she reports, there’s a double burden of being on the street: being homeless, and being judged for it. Some of the street people Roy meets even shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won’t know their predicament.

And yet Roy still recognizes the American dream. She reports that it often burns brighter in a Mumbai slum — where a young gig worker told her he wants to be “the Elon Musk of India” — than it does in America itself. That dream can be real, she says, just as it can be cracked. From the back of her San Francisco cab, Saumya Roy sees both Americas.

Five Takeaways

• “I Walked from Mumbai to the US.” A cab driver’s five words contain the whole story: beneath the Indian-born CEOs, countless compatriots chased the same dream and were left behind.

• The Double Burden. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster but social — families, cradles, cooking smells. America’s is a shopping cart on an endless subway ride — and here, you are judged for it.

• What Is Growth For? $250 million AI salaries and trillion-dollar IPOs above; young Americans priced out below. Growth must deliver for those who need it most.

• The Mumbai Model. In Roy’s lifetime, Mumbai moved 100,000+ people off its sidewalks — by community and dignity, not sweeps. “They deserve a hug more than they deserve to be evicted.”

• The Dream Burns Brighter Abroad. A gig worker in a Mumbai slum wants to be “the Elon Musk of India.” The dream still sells — Americans feel it cracking.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy How We See It: thedial.world/how-we-see-it

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: How We See It, via The Dial
00:01:38 How do you see America?
00:03:00 The cracked dream
00:03:07 “I walked from Mumbai to the US”
00:05:53 Comparing poverty: Mumbai and San Francisco
00:06:27 Cooking smells vs shopping carts: poverty and isolation
00:08:30 Is social poverty more bearable?
00:09:01 The double burden: homeless and judged for it
00:09:48 A small army in the world’s richest city
00:10:30 The necessary cost of economic domination?
00:10:57 What is growth for?
00:12:13 Behind the Beautiful Forevers: are Americans aware?
00:13:45 Before and after Trump
00:15:29 Marche and the zombification of America
00:16:06 The idea of America: an emotional darkness
00:16:50 Innovation and inequality in parallel
00:17:31 $250 million salaries and the AI wave
00:19:32 A billionaire tax? The view from the Gulf
00:21:16 “I want to be the Elon Musk of India”
00:22:54 OpenAI’s 5%: the world watches California
00:24:46 What can America learn from Mumbai?
00:25:26 The Mumbai model: community, dignity, housing
00:27:59 A hug, not an eviction
00:29:34 The crisis of democracy: parties and fragmentation
00:31:22 Technology: chatbots, teenagers, and coming regulation
00:33:25 Environment: the sharp pivot to fossil fuels
00:35:08 Thanks and goodbye