Saturday, January 17, 2009

Slumdog Millionaire and White Tiger

So to follow up my last massive post, I wanted to talk about Slumdog Millionaire and White Tiger, which are the two easiest ways for anyone at home to get a sense of what India is really like.

Slumdog Millionaire (Warning: Slight plot spoiler) is an interesting movie in which the main character, Jamal Malik, progresses through the questions of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," with each segment being interrupted with a flashback chronicling his difficult upbringing from orphan to his current position working in a call center and the intertwined story of the love of his life, Latika. While the story is very catching and the movie has its own merit, the most interesting part for me was seeing the portrayal of Indian culture. At the beginning of the movie, the slums in Mumbai are shown, and although I did not travel to Mumbai, Mike and Sam have told me this is a very accurate representation, and I have seen similar poverty in the rest of India. Later on, the director takes some artistic license by cleaning up the city for several scenes. For instance, there is a scene in the train station, and it looks like a regular bustling train station. However, by all accounts, there are literally thousands of homeless people sleeping on the platform, so merely walking to or from a train is a daunting task. It is also one of the worst smelling places on earth.

The depictions of children begging and their "masters" is also mostly accurate. Begging is so entrenched in Indian culture that poor parents will send out children to beg for money. Even worse, they will mutilate their own children, by blinding them or hacking off limbs, so that the pity will generate higher income. There is a scene depicting this sort of violence with a collective, where an entrepreneurial man (I use the term loosely) picks up orphan children and feeds them in exchange for their begging services. After they are old enough, he will mutilate them as well.

Later in the movie, Jamal's brother Salim says that India is the center of the new, developing world. Although I strongly disagree with this point of view, many Indians do seem to share it. They see high rise buildings going up and see that they have a large corporation (Tata), and they think they are the next world powerhouse. In reality, their building construction is so poor that the buildings look like they have aged fifty years before they are completed, and Tata is only internationally known because they provide every product to Indians, making it a billion dollar company.

White Tiger provides a more complete lesson as to the problems in India right now, from corruption to lack of education to lack of sanitation.

An excerpt:

One day, as I was driving my ex-employers Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam in their Honday City car, Mr Ashok put a hand on my shoulder, and said, 'Pull over to the side.' Following this command, he leaned forward so close that I could smell his aftershave - it was a delicious, fruitlike smell that day - and said, politely as ever, 'Balram, I have a few questions to ask you, all right?'
'Yes, sir,' I said.
'Balram,' Mr Ashok asked, ' how many planets are there in the sky?'
I gave the answer as best as I could.
'Balram, who was the first prime minister of India?'
And then: 'Balram, what is the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim?'
And then: 'What is the name of our continent?'
Mr Ashok leaned back and asked Pinky Madam, 'Did you hear his answers?'
'Was he joking?' she asked, and my heart beat faster, as it did every time she said something.
'No. That's really what he thinks the correct answers are.'
She giggled when she heard this: but his face, which I saw reflected in my rearview mirror, was serious.
'The thing is, he probably has... what, two, three years of schooling in him? He can read and write, but he doesn't get what he's read. He's half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I'll tell you that. And we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy' - he pointed at me - 'to characters like these. That's the whole tragedy of this country.'
He sighed.
'All right, Balram, start the car again.'
That night, I was lying in bed, inside my mosquito net, thinking about his words. He was right, sir - I didn't like the way he had spoken about me, but he was right.
'The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian.' That's what I ought to call my life's story.
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half-hour before falling asleep - all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

Although I find the narration style and actual plot less than perfect, the insight into Indian culture far outweighs any criticisms I have of the story. I have heard a few people comment on what they though about Slumdog Millionaire, but I am curious what everyone else thinks.

1 comment:

  1. Blake,

    I haven't read White Tiger, but it's on my reading list. I did recently see Slumdog Millionaire and really enjoyed it. I've yet to see India, but I'm sure the movie wasn't overly harsh on the situation there. I've read some Indians feel offended that all the slums and villages were highlighted in the movie. Hey, that's what most of India is like.

    My parents went to India in the 80's and my mom was pretty worried when I told her you went there. She said it was insanely crowded, poverty was rampant, and it was unbelievable dirty. I can only imagine how much more poverty, trash, and people have accumulated in 25 years.

    Also, while China has a billion plus, it's important to note their 1-child policy has helped save hundreds of millions of children from being born. India has fiercely opposed any law like this and while one prime minister of theirs took it in her own hands to sterilize villagers (where people have 8-12 kids) she became very unpopular and the sterilization ceased.

    These days all we hear about are India and China. But they really shouldn't be put in the same sentence. Robyn Meredith, who writes for Forbes wrote a book comparing the two . She argues that India is way behind-- horrible infrastructure, bad systems, lazy, etc. She's more optimistic on China.

    I don't think any acceleration will be able to help Indians out of poverty if they keep having kids at the rate they do. India is 1/5th the size of the US. How will they ever have enough roads, schools, water, oil, etc?

    -Sean

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