After seeing the film Slumdog Millionaire a few weeks ago, I felt not jubilant, but disturbed. Having been to India five times and (collectively) spending 1.5 years in various locales, I’ve experienced the fascinating, difficult country firsthand.
Poverty is ever-present. The slums are not always hushed into dark pockets of the cities; they may exist alongside opulence on busy boulevards. Though, some slum areas, as shown in the film, are being leveled with high-rise complexes put in their place, further displacing the marginalized. And this is cause for concern.
A good friend of mine, a native of Calcutta, recently told me this in a correspondence:
In India the situation is getting from bad to worse. There is NO accountability at all. The new change now is that many of the downtroddens are rising up to protest / to demand . The Adivasis are rising. The Maoists movement is spreading like wild fire in India. They have support bases in Nepal and Bangladesh. They are as bad as the criminals in other parties. We have lots of political parties with all kinds of names, but basically the goal is the same – ” to come to power and to remain in power ” at any cost.
In Delhi the slums are being destroyed and people are being displaced in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games:
India razes slums, leaves poor homeless
Maiming children, as they did in the film by blinding a boy, is not simply a movie phenomenon nor is it a rare occurrence. If a begging person is missing part of a limb or if they are blind, more money may be extracting from the unwitting. It plays on our emotions.
During my last trip to India I had a personal encounter with a young boy who was a victim of intentional maiming. I was walking down Main Bazaar in Delhi when he spotted me. Westerners with money enough to travel to India are prime targets.
He came running towards me and then trotted alongside me, parroting “fifty rupees!, fifty rupees!”. It was the desolate look in his eyes that first caught my attention. Seeing his missing hand explained the expression.
The end of his arm was covered with a clean, stark white bandage. It stood in sharp contrast to the layers of dirt on his face, feet and clothes.
I stopped walking and asked him “who did this to you?” Both enraged and haunted by this child’s circumstance, I continued to try talking with him but he only knew enough english to beg for money, not converse with a foreigner.
I did not give the child 50 rupees but settled on ten in exchange for his portrait. I felt a twinge of guilt about that, but I knew I would not be allowed one without compensation.
I saw the boy a few days later in nearly the same stretch of Main Bazaar. However, this time his bandage was bloody and dirty. He was jumping up and down with his mutilated arm in the air, trying to get the attention of a (western) couple who were in conversation and paying no attention to him.
A month later, in Dharamsala, I met a man who had also seen this boy when he was in Delhi. He told me he saw him squeezing the end of his arm to make the bandage bloodier, and hopefully, more profitable.
Those who’ve not spent time in India wouldn’t necessarily know what parts of the film Slumdog Millionaire are fact versus fiction, though it’s well known that India is home to a wealth of impoverished people.
The fiction is the fairy-tale ending, and the sense it gives moviegoers, that despite deep poverty and dangerous conditions, the people are still smiling happy, even dancing for joy in the railway station, a place where many street children make their home.
I think this illusion gives us permission to go back to life as usual after the credits roll and the curtain falls. Their situation and suffering is not something we need concern ourselves with. Besides, they’re happy. Aren’t they?
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See: Slumdog Millionaire’s child actors still live in ‘grinding poverty’ in Mumbai
Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, two of the child actors in “Slumdog Millionaire,” are still living in the slums of Mumbai, despite the film’s $14 million budget and worldwide success. Ali earned 500 British pounds ($710) for one year’s work and Ismail earned 1700 pounds ($2414), “less than many Indian domestic servants“:
Both children were found places in a local school and receive £20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.
Just curious. You gave the kid 10 roepie for his picture. How much would you pay to a western kid… after talking to his mom?
not that I am any better. Just curious…
I don’t pay people to take their photos, though I have had children in India ask me to take theirs, swearing they did not want money, and then afterwards, demand it. But this child, who was begging for money, would not have let me take his photo without an exchange. In this case I was reluctant, not wanting to support the ‘beggar mafia’, but wanted it for educational purposes, such as for this article.
Yes, yes but that’s because you can… in India. If it were your child would you have a stranger take his/hers picture, to put it on the internet for the world to see?
I would have a really hard time finding my baby’s picture on the internet without any form of permission.
I’m not talking about the money but more about the perspective. This kid has nobody except the maffia, and they won’t protect him. not like a mother atleast. The picture in itself, if I may say so, is not something new, we all know – people see what they want to see and frankly not to many are bothered with the darksides of life as you mentioned.
It’s 2:11 on this side of the planet and my words probably come out the wrong way, I just felt to react and I know the dilemma but whether it is a begging child posing in front of you or acting slumdog millionaire there is no difference. A prop or for educational purpose. No name, just a face. No child just a picture.
Like I said, I’m not any better but it scares me at times that these children have no rights especially when they are in very wrong situations.
purnima –
Photographs of children appear on the internet and in other forms of public media all the time. Pictures tell stories. This boy’s picture tells the world an important story, a dirty secret that many people are unaware of.
There may be plenty who are not ‘bothered with the dark sides of life’, but many of us are. We care and we speak out to raise awareness about such injustices. As you said, the mafia is not there to protect him; they exploit him. I admitted in my article that I had some apprehension about giving him money, not wanting to further exploit the child. But my intentions were/are to help protect him by exposing this malicious practice.
After reading this article, I just feel that I need more information on the topic. Could you suggest some more resources please?
Ted — I do not have specific resources, but suggest that you do a search on ‘child maiming in India’ or ‘beggar mafia’. There is also a story by two journalists who spoke undercover with a ‘maiming’ doctor in India. I’ll see if I can locate that article.