What I Learned Today - Art Imitates Life

10th March 2009

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Art Imitates Life

The feel good movie of the year returns its stars to their homes… in the slums of Mumbai.

After a week of walking the red carpet, riding the rides at Disneyland, and sleeping in actual beds, the child stars of Slumdog Millionaire returned to their homes last week. This segment from ABC News last week and all of the recent coverage floors me for a number of reasons.

These kids actually live in the slums. In windowless huts. In fact, Azharuddin Ismal’s (the young Salim) family’s hut was illegal and was therefore demolished by local authorities in early January. He now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarp.
Boyle states the actors were paid a “good salary.” But £500 for Rubina Rafiq (who played young Latika) and £1700 for Azharuddin hardly seems like a good salary, even if it is “three times the amount of an annual adult salary” in the local area. Compare that to the £9,000 salary paid to the child actors in the Kite Runner, or what some of Hollywood’s stars are paid these days.
While I applaud Boyle’s efforts for setting up a trust fund for when the children turn 18, it is predicated on them finishing school. That may may be a difficult task in such living conditions. Additionally, he can learn from the Salaam Balaak Trust, set up by the producers of Salaam Bombay, a film about Mumbai street kids. The producers provided 27 slum kids an education and a safe place to live, supervised their investments until they were 18, and arranged for vocational training for some. Yet most of the kids took to petty crime.
How can the movie studio expose the children to luxuries in America, then return them to the slums and expect everything to be okay? Rubina has stated, “I don’t want to sleep on the floor anymore. I want a proper bed and live where the air does not smell of poo. I have seen what it is like in America. Here, there is garbage everywhere, people get angry, swear and shout. I have realized how bad life is here. I just want to get out.”

But what is the studio supposed to do - extract the children and their families from their homes and bring them to America? Well, some films have done so. The filmmakers of Born Into Brothels, a documentary about the lives of Calcutta’s red-light district, helped the girls featured in the film get out of the slum and into America. One is even studying at the Tisch school at NYU.

Turns out the Indian government has actually stepped in and has provided these children and their family free homes because they “have made the nation proud.” We’ll see if that actually happens.
So yes, it appears there were some problems with the payment and treatment of these kids. But beyond that - where is the change? Slumdog is a film that exposes some awful truths that need to be addressed. Instead of exploiting these people and marketing the film as the feel good movie of the year, what about using it as a platform for change? Is it enough to pay for the three child stars’ education? Where is the fund that is set up to help these millions of slum dwellers? Where is the fund that helps keep beggars off the street, and helps keep children from being maimed, as the film exposed? Where is the establishment of a microfinance program to help them self sustain and attain better living conditions?