As we in the U.S. watched the federal government shut down because of one man’s fixation on a border-wall boondoggle meant to exclude desperate families fleeing violence and poverty, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, an estimated 3.5 to 5 million women forcefully demonstrated that exclusion is not the only reason to build a wall.

Here’s the story of how millions of brave women came together to demand gender equality, respect, and inclusion by using their bodies as the building blocks to form a 385-mile-long human chain. They called their wall the Vanitha mathil, or the women’s wall.

The story begins in September 2018, when India’s supreme court overturned a centuries-old ban that forbade women of reproductive age from entering the Sabarimala Temple in Kerala. The Sabarimala Temple is an important annual pilgrimage destination for more than a million Hindus. Although the supreme court’s decision was groundbreaking, it failed to alter long-held religious beliefs about the impurity of women’s bodies. It also failed to stop the day-to-day shaming and discrimination of menstruating girls and women—who are forbidden to prepare food or even to step foot in a temple.

Since the ruling, the Hindu nationalist party and religious hardliners have ramped up their intimidation tactics. Female pilgrims have been attacked. Women between the ages of ten and fifty have been prevented from entering the temple. Journalists have been denied access and pushed out of the area. Police charged with protecting female worshipers have been battered with stones.

Women of all ages responded by pulling out their most powerful asset—themselves. Does their response sound familiar to those of you who took to the streets for women’s marches following the 2016 election? Or ran for office in 2018? Or decided to override guilt and shame to speak out about discrimination, intimidation, or sexual assault?

On New Year’s Day 2019, Karala’s women’s wall became the largest gathering of women demonstrating in support of gender equality in India’s history. The next day, two 40-year-old women under police protection entered Sabarimala Temple and offered their prayers. In defiance of the court, after the women left the temple was shut down for a cleansing ritual.

Speaking on behalf of the local government’s intention to uphold the court’s decision and reflecting on the clash of women’s demand for equal treatment and the intransigence of traditional religious beliefs, KK Sahilaja, minister for social justice in Kerala and a participant in the women’s wall, pulled no punches. “We stand for gender equality,” she said. “Those saying that women are impure should be ashamed of themselves. How can they say women are impure in front of God.”

I am not a Hindu, nor do I feel a connection to any religion. But that doesn’t matter. I recognize in the faces of the women and girls of Kerala the same determination of all women to fight for our right to be included.

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Last night, I attended a presentation looking at trends in world population since biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968, a best-selling work of non-fiction that scared everyone, and spurred the Zero Population Growth [ZPG] movement. This morning, I learned that China is ending its decades-old, one-child policy. What a juxtaposition!

So, what happened? Why didn’t the population bomb detonate? And how does China’s policy reversal play into this story?

I learned most of what I now know about the complicated aftermath of The Population Bomb from Sara Weiser, a reporter for The Retro Report, an innovative, documentary news organization. Retro Report, founded in 2013, looks back at some of the big news stories of recent years to see what has happened since, how things may have changed, or even to correct the record:

From The Retro Report website:

How often does a great story dominate the headlines, only to be dropped from the news cycle? How often do journalists tell us of a looming danger or important discovery – only to move quickly to the next new thing? What really happened? How did these events change us? And what are the lingering consequences that may affect our society to this day?

…Complicating matters, the first draft of history can be wrong. When news organizations fail to invest the time and money required to correct the record or provide context around what really happened, myth can replace truth. The results are policy decisions and cultural trends built on error, misunderstanding or flat-out lies.

Retro Report is there to pick up the story after everyone has moved on, connecting the dots from yesterday to today, correcting the record and providing a permanent living library where viewers can gain new insight into the events that shaped their lives.

Weiser applied these questions and principles to Ehrlich’s predictions. Her reporting focused on India—whose exploding population inspired Ehrlich’s research and dire predictions. Ehrlich predicted that, if birth rates continued at their 1968 rate, by 2000 there would be so many people on Earth that there might not be enough food to sustain life.

The result of Weiser’s exploration of post-Population Bomb India is a documentary report, which you can view here. [Highly recommended.]

In her report, Weiser includes archival clips from 1960s news reports sharing Erhlich’s dire warnings, interviews with Ehrlich and some of his followers—then and now—an examination of India’s governmental policies [for better and for worse] that have impacted the country’s birth rate, and commentary on other factors that have played a role in defusing the predicted population bomb.

What’s the answer? It’s complicated. Weiser’s report shows that, while India has instituted policies that have been effective in promoting sex education, birth control and voluntary sterilization, the results differ in rich and poor regions of the country. There’s also measurable inequality between regions regarding the availability of education and healthcare services for women and children. One of the lessons of the report is that, as healthcare services improve, families—who often rely on children as revenue-producers in agricultural areas—feel more confident that their children will survive, so they don’t feel compelled to have so many.

And then, of course, there is the Green Revolution factor. As the report reminds us, you don’t need as many hands on the farm when you have modern machinery and better-yielding crops. Clearly, Ehrlich did not foresee the development of the genetically modified seeds that have revolutionized farming.

Finally, there’s the bottom line: It has been demonstrated many times that, as families—particularly women—become more educated and more economically secure, birth rates decline. And, in fact, as the documentary notes, we now have a situation in which economically developed countries—Japan is a prime example—are worrying that their birth rates are too low.

Which brings us to China.

China’s decision to end the one-child-family rule, instituted in 1979, may offer the ultimate repudiation of Ehrlich’s prognostications. China remains cautious about overpopulation–it’s still limiting families, but now the limit is two children, not just one. But the lifting of the one-child restriction reflects China’s worry that its population has begun to age out of the work force, with not enough younger replacements. Interestingly, although the one-child limit has been seen as onerous and inhumane by many, the rising economic status of many Chinese families has already spurred a trend toward voluntarily smaller families.

So, was Ehrlich wrong? Yes and no. He didn’t—and couldn’t– foresee some of the factors that drove lower birth rates. But he was prescient about the impact of having too many people on the planet. Today, while birth rates have diminished in many places, the same factors that spurred the slowdown—primarily the improving economic status of families—have created a new monster: We may not be growing in numbers as quickly as Ehrlich predicted, but each of us has access to and is using more of Earth’s finite resources. Now what?

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I’ve just read–two years after everyone else–Katherine Boo’s powerful book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. It won the 2012 National Book Award, and a blurb on the back cover of the just-released softcover edition says, “Reported like Watergate and written like Great Expectations.”  I usually ignore those blurbs, but in this case, it’s an extremely apt summary.

Boo goes–literally–behind the scenes in the Annawadi slum of Mumbai, India–a jumbled, filthy and impoverished area hidden from the view of westerners and better-off Indian citizens by concrete walls built to “protect” Mumbai’s airport and its adjacent luxury hotels. [The title of the book refers to a series of billboard ads plastered, end-to-end, onto the concrete barrier. The ads promote high-priced, designer floor tiles that promise to be “BEAUTIFUL FOREVER  BEAUTIFUL FOREVER  BEAUTIFUL FOREVER”]

Boo’s reporting centers on a few of Annawadi’s residents: 17-year-old Abdul–who sorts  trash picked up by others and sells it by the pound to recyclers; Asha, a striving, 40-year-old whose ambition is to rise above the squalor of Annawadi, which she accomplishes, bit by bit, by becoming a local fixer by day and a call girl by night. Manju and Meena, 15-year-old girls whose futures are dictated by the social norms of arranged marriages; Fatima, viciously beaten by her husband, berated by society for a birth defect that left her one-legged–her out-of-control, self-destructive rage created havoc in her small corner of the slum; and Sunil, Sonu, Kalu and other teenagers and adults who survive by scavenging the enormous, rat-infested garbage dump and sewage lake around which the Annawadi slum has grown.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers offers an intimate, unvarnished look at a life that is simply unimaginable to someone like me. As you turn the pages, you get to know people in Annawadi who subsist on pennies per day and spend hours standing in line for the trickle of water provided at sporadic times at public spigots. You see them striving to become what they describe as “first-class” people, desperately trying to decipher the behavioral codes that they believe could open the doors to a better life. They are ignored by their government, they are invisible to the rich people who fly into and out of the airport whose throwaways are Annawadi’s life blood, and they are brutalized by a legal system that is violent and corrupt at every level. They are helpless against a social system that expects bribes for the most basic services. And the shrewdest among them victimize their own neighbors.

It’s terribly disheartening, so much so that suicide–by ingesting rat poison, or by self-immolation–is too often perceived as the only way out, and Boo describes several examples among Annawadi residents she helps us get to know. Equally dispiriting are Boo’s detailed accounts of the many ways that government-funded programs and well-intentioned non-profits–whose purported goals are to help and offer hope to slum-dwellers–are routinely gamed by corrupt politicians and community members who skim and pocket funds for their own use.

In a passage toward the end of the book, Boo laments the poverty and  powerlessness of the people who live in Annawadi. Her analysis of the vicious cycle that rules their lives is a sad commentary–not just on the lives of Annawadi’s citizens, but also on the lives of impoverished and politically marginalized people everywhere:

The slumdwellers rarely got mad together…Instead, powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes, they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes…they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate…they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.

What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.

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