Down and Out Today ― Notes from the Gutter

A comparison between impoverished communities in UK and India explores the meaning of poverty today, questioning whether it's specific only to money

What does poverty mean today? Writer Matthew Small seeks to answer this question and witness the similarities and differences between poverty in the UK and India. Poverty stretches across all of humanity and by traveling East, Small encounters the raw faces of poverty in India’s slums; he works in a leprosy community, and joins the Sisters of Mercy on the smoggy and exhilarating streets in Calcutta. He then returns to the UK to see what the passing of three months means to those who are scarred by one of the most unglamorous of all humanities’ ills, being poor. Small engages with different community members who are living with poverty, to answer these long standing questions: What’s keeping them down? What’s pushing them out? And how can we move forward?

Matthew Small is a fiction writer and freelance journalist. In 2012 he embarked on a trip to the Holy Land to further his political understanding of the area, which is documented in his debut bookThe Wall Between Us.