A different Aesthetic, Personal

The depiction of poverty in our Vintage Book seems much more personal than the portrayal in Slumdog or Q&A. Here it is not a backdrop. The various authors use the concept less as an aesthetic and more as a setting. The difference is perhaps in where the drama plays out. Whereas in Q&A the lead character has come from a varied background. There is almost an insolence/ sarcasm in Ram's question "What business did a penniless waiter have participating in a brain quiz?" He has lived in many aspects of slum life but his personal background is not necessarly that. He is at once a Slumdog and an outsider able to rise above.
In the Vintage Book the stories are set within poverty. The short stories do not portray it as a film background to a larger story, but rather use poverty as the setting for their various narratives. They live it. They deal with characters that have come of age in this state and will likely never leave it. In 'Gifts' the young girl's dream is to marry and to have 'snacks' in a restaurant. In 'Arjun' we end the story with Ketu in a drunken frenzy of merriment. 'Sheesha Ghat' is a mysterious yet barren stretch of sand and water. 'Siege in Kailashpada' shows a boss's first brutal steps toward power and his subsequent suicide. These are stories within poverty. It is not an aesthetic in terms of a backdrop to the main drama; the state of poverty is the state within which these tales are told.