Down and Out Today: Notes from the Gutter

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 travelling East, Small encounters the raw faces of poverty in India’s slums; he works in a leprosy community, joins the Sisters of Mercy on the littered yet exhilarating streets of Kolkata. He then returns to the UK, to Bath, 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?