The other India
I went to see "Slumdog Millionaire" last night. It is a great film, directed by Danny Boyle of "Trainspotting" fame, about a boy from the Mumbai slums who wins 20 million Indian Rupees (a little over U.S. $415,000) in India's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and in so doing captures the heart of the love of his life.
That description is the film the trailer leads you to expect, but it fails to convey the unremitting darkness of "Slumdog Millionaire." The story is played out as flashbacks as the Indian police torture the young man, Jamil, trying to make him wrongly confess that he got as far as he did in the competition through cheating. I won't tell you why he was arrested, because that would give away too much of the story. But what really got to me were the scenes of Dickensian poverty in the film.
Many of us in the U.S. tend to think of India as the place that steals our jobs through their hard work, good education, and willingness to work for less. All of that is true, but it ignores the dire poverty and caste inequality that India has failed to eliminate. What we think of as India is only the thin, top layer of a multi-layered country. Jamil comes from the lowest layer, literally living on a garbage heap, where public education is a tiny, cramped room if he shows up at all. The Fagin in this Indian version of Oliver Twist teaches orphans to sing and then blinds them because blind child singers can make more money on the street. "Slumdog Millionaire" is not for the squeamish. Even Charles Dickens himself would have been shocked by these terrible scenes.
One wonders how long India can maintain this type of a society, where the few live as kings and the masses scrape by in dire poverty. You don't sense that this sort of inequality exists in that other Asian giant, China, where communism, for all its faults, eliminated things like caste discrimination and anti-religious violence (Jamil's mother, a Muslim, is murdered by a Hindu mob in the film). It is not enough for the West to fund Mother Teresa-type missions to help the poor survive and accept their lot. The lot must change.
Like so many films, it has a happy ending with the young lovers dancing in the Mumbai train station in true Bollywood fashion. But as you watch it, remember this was the same train station attacked by Pakistani terrorists in November. Ten people were killed as they fired automatic weapons randomly at the crowds of people you see in the film.