My wife and I did something unusual for us, at least since two of her kids (my stepdaughters) were admitted to the U.S. last October: we went out on a date. She was off work, I had finished a project, and the time seemed right. She has friends with which to go see chick flicks, so I chose something that I thought she would not be likely to see otherwise, based on my having heard from many respectable sources that it was great: Slumdog Millionaire.
I don't think anyone else on the site has diaried about it (or if they have, they didn't tag it); I think we're past due. The movie was quite good, I thought, though at heart still a Bollywood melodrama. Still, I would not be sorry if it won Best Picture (except, perhaps, given the quality of some of its competition); it's a movie that Americans should see to understand.
There are some spoilers below, but if I tell you that it's about a boy who grew up in the slums of Bombay, they should involve little that you wouldn't already anticipate. I'll try to delay getting to them for a while, and will post a warning.
Slumdog Millionaire is, to a great extent, a heartwarming story of the brutal lives suffered by the poor of India, if that makes sense to you, and if it doesn't you should definitely see it to decide for yourself.
What it brought to mind to me was my only trip to India, with my first wife, who was Indian. (My second wife is Filipina.) In 1995, as Newt Gingrich was shutting down the government, we went to visit the grandmother who had been too frail to come to our wedding and many new in-laws. It was a long vacation, courtesy of a favorable academic calendar, and included a fair amount of time in Bombay (technically then, but not really yet, "Mumbai"), Goa, and the northern triangle of Delhi, Jaipur, and Agra, the site of the Taj Mahal. (If you can see the Taj, you must; it is the least disappointing site I have ever visited in the world.)
Some Kosters live in India and many have visited more often, more recently, and more intensively. They should probably be the ones writing this diary, but they haven't and I am, so perhaps it will prompt something better in reply.
My trip to Bombay, in particular, was a life-changing one. And here, I should post a warning that I'm about to tread upon some events that occur in the film; we'll call it a:
MILD SPOILER WARNING
And in case you're one of the people who always worries that they'll look a little bit below the box and be inadvertantly spoiled, here's something that is no secret to anyone: the music of A. R. Rahman, probably the most talented musical composer of the past 50 years (and I include the Beatles), is fantastic per his usual. (Prediction: over 50% of the comments section will address that past half-sentence.)
On my trip to Bombay, where I walked through or past most of the areas hit in last month's bombings, I was pestered by hawkers for being a light-skinned American. Nothing new or bad about that; everyone has to make a living. No, what got to me was something I first encountered as we set off on a journey to Elephanta Island: the crippled beggar children.
At first, I gave: how could one not? They were missing arms, eyes, legs, parts of faces. HOW COULD ONE NOT?!!! And then one of my in-laws clued me in on a secret: these children were crippled deliberately. Crippled children made better beggars because of the evident need for support.
Yeah, I remember saying in response, that may be true, but surely some children in India really are crippled in accidents! How do I know that the one I'm giving to isn't supporting a racket on the order of blood diamonds, but could be going to someone who was not crippled deliberately?
They don't get to beg here, was the answer. The people that cripple these kids control the turf. They chase off everyone else.
I don't know if this was entirely true, but that message has been conveyed from many sources, and not just tonight. This is a problem with personal charity as a model for a social safety net. Someone may stand to benefit from increasing the need for charity, and in mortifying ways. For the rest of the trip, I assigned a value to every crippled child beggar who approached me. Rather than giving money to them directly, at the end of the trip I donated that amount to OxFam.
I don't think that a lot of Americans have to deal with realities quite so terrible. I think that our lack of perspective on how bad life gets in the world, how evil suffering even outside of the depradations of formal capitalism can be, perverts our perspective. Having seen that sort of poverty is one reason, for example, that I am not involved in activism against the death penalty generally, even though I oppose it and think that our common recourse to it shames our society. We create and abide so much suffering in the world that whether a given guilty person is executed or receives life in prison without parole seems low on my priority list. Yes, the imposition of the death penalty diminishes all of us. Well, we are diminished far more, by far more than that, every day. (Second prediction: most of the other half of the comments will be about this paragraph.)
My then-wife and I left our inexpensive hotel one day in a taxi. The driver chose to take us the long way to wherever it is we were going. It involved a detour down a long set of streets, which we shortly realized was a red-light district. This wasn't so unusual for a male American traveler; the taxi driver probably got a commission off anyone he sent into the right door. Avoiding that sort of thing is why I don't travel alone in Asia (just as embracing it is why Rush Limbaugh vacations in the Dominican Republic.) What was different, for me at least, was that many of the girls, hanging out of windows, appeared to be between eight and ten years old. I remember not being able to decide if I was more insulted that he thought I might be interested in these wares or that he was doing it while I was sitting next to my wife. We commented a few times that this didn't appear to be the right route before finally banging on the back of a front seat saying "WRONG WAY! MOVE ON!" The cabbie gave the everpresent Indian response, "No problem," but of course it was, and not primarily ours.
LARGER SPOILER AHEAD
By the way, to protect you from this spoiler, there is great food in Bandra, in the North of Bombay.
OK, ready?
The starkest weakness of Slumdog was one line, where the director and prodeucers probably made a correct determination of what the audience could take. The pubescent female lead, looking maybe 13, has been trained as an exotic dancer, in probably the same district through which I was driven. He notes that her value to him was greater because she was a virgin. (See, audience, don't worry!)
That, I think, was a lie. Not, I suspect, at 13.
As we left the film I talked to my wife about the movie. She said that she was familiar with the intentional crippling of child beggars; it happens in the Philippines too, she said. I'd never seen it in three trips, I told her. They've been cracking down, she said. But it's all over the world.
Not in the United States, I said. Not yet, she answered.
We Americans are a sheltered people. If we can watch Slumdog without distancing ourselves from the society depicted, without recognizing that there too we could go, we will be a little less sheltered, and that is all to the good.