Slumdog Millionaire

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read this if you haven't seen Slumdog Millionaire.



I took a mini-vacation from blogging, partly because I was busy and partly because I didn’t feel I had anything of substance to share. Since I’m years past being a student, everything I’ve learned in the past 5 and a half years has come from one of a handful of sources, books, the news, conversation, and movies. And frankly, only when and if I discover something insightful, engaging or memorable, do I feel I have something worth writing about. And even then I risk being misunderstood or worse, ignored.

After a week’s worth of dismal recession talk. I 've counted no less than five long conversations in person or on email about people losing their jobs in publishing, television, or the Internet. I worry over which writers, lawyers and banker friends still sitting at their desks waiting to be tapped, will actually be next. Sunday morning, I listened to a two-week old BBC podcast. I don't mean this to sound funny, but the man being interviewed sounded so incredibly hopeless and his voice reminded me of Eeyore. He'd run a forklift for over 31 years and his father, had worked for GM before him. He told a BBC reporter, "We can see that it's all necessary, it's just a matter of giving us you know, a little consideration, down on the shop floor, We'd like to be able to plan a little bit. It is our lives after all."

In the context of all this desperation, I decided perhaps rather appropriately that I needed to see Slumdog Millionaire. The film is in some ways the kind of cotton candy rags to riches fantasy that fuels the Bollywood industry, and it’s interesting to see that in the U.S. it’s the kind of escapism we crave right now.

A boy and his brother are orphaned, in a vivid and very true-to-life scene, where Hindu extremists slaughter Muslims. As they flee the area, they take along a third girl orphan girl, Latika. The three clever urchins scrimp scrounge and steal until circumstance splits the third musketeer , the girl, from the group. The younger brother Jamal, makes it his mission to find her and to save her.

I won't reveal the entire plot but this is where the spoiler begins so stop now if you haven't seen it. Leaving the theatre I noticed, the same Christmas-like exuberance that follows a fairytale ending. I remember feeling it after seeing Amelie in the theater for the first-time. And why shouldn’t people have been happy? Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, it was the formula we wanted. On top of that, and in true Indian fashion, the good guys get rich. It was heart-warming, purist, but not Disney-fied, apart from the Bollywood (Bhangra?) dance routine that ran through the credits.

While I didn’t want to be a buzzkill, it seemed the giddy excitement of the romance triggered some form of instantaneous amnesia towards the much darker ending, Saleem, the protagonist's brother’s suicide. I felt like the entire audience had forgotten him. In a reflection that seemed out of character, (I generally look for the silver lining rather than pointing out the thorny and jagged edges) I wanted to consider the story from a realist’s perspective. And to me it seemed the sadder and quickly forgotten story of Saleem, a scrappy slum kid, hardened by society, taught in Darwinist fashion to bargain, steal, lie, kill, and even rape his childhood friend (while only vaguely alluded to, this seems highly likely) seemed the more powerful and perhaps the truer story. But who am I to say what's real.

I have never been to India. My sister, curiously, was on a flight to India just as I was sitting down in the theater. I texted her as her plane prepared for departure, to let her know that while she was on her way to a town outside Vellore, where she had lived for a year, I was attempting to experience life in India on screen.

I have never been to India, but I have visited Southeast Asia. During my visit, I did see a sliver of the rough side of life there. I saw beggars that had been maimed by roadside bombs in Cambodia. On Kho San Road in Thailand, I saw teenage girls petting and being petted by men decades older and even listened nauseated as an Australian man attempted to explain to me that this was a different kind of a woman, who wanted these things. This was a life that was worked for her, that it was a "good life." I did not slap him, but would anyone have blamed me if I had.

I did not give money or food to every begging child, mother, or grandmother. I took their photos and occasionally bought a pencil or a soda. Much like in the movie, there were so many sad faces, so many beggars, children holding babies, mothers wailing, and I found that in less than a week I had hardened myself to all of them. But in some places the children despite whatever tumultuous past they had, despite whatever horrors they had seen, they actually did seem happy.

I visited an orphanage run by two Swiss women where children ate together, sang together, played together and prayed together. The older girl acted as mothers for the younger ones. They lived with them, as if they were true families in individual huts. Each one cared for every child younger than themselves and seven and eight year-olds took turns carrying around the babies.

Unsupervised, they all played together in a big room, regardless of age. They played games that looked like "buck buck"-- where a train of bent over bodies forms a line with their heads tucked in and a team of kids one by one literally runs jumps and throws their little bodies at the train, trying to collapse it. Some would chat in groups while others would kick and punch helicopter-like in tiny buzzing circles without any regard for who got in their way. But when someone got hurt they didn't cry for more than a minute. They never expected anyone to hear them and to see that they were okay. They liked having their picture taken. They liked holding my hand and sitting in my lap. But as much as I liked seeing them I did not know how to say goodbye. On the day that I was leaving, I was afraid to go back. I worried that the women who ran the orphanage, and had been somewhat hesitant to let me in, thought that I considered myself self-important. That saying goodbye was an invitation to be missed, after only a few days. Or maybe I was afraid that the children would actually miss me, that they might actually cry and ask me to stay. I did not say goodbye and apart from realizing that this orphanage was where I should have started my journey instead of ended it, it was the greatest regret or my trip.

Still, this slip of life, this glimmer of how others live was as close as I have come. If a movie, by inducing pity and horror and then washing it away with a light-hearted, sparkly ending, (though admittedly, traces of darkness did seep through) can bring back that same unsettled feeling, that realization of how little I actually know of the world, I think it's worth experiencing.