Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Crissy, Amma, Daddy and I went to see Slumdog Millionaire today. I liked the movie, but it left me with an uneasy feeling. If you haven’t seen the movie here’s a short synopsis (some minor spoilers):

Slumdog Millionaire is the story of Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, who is about to experience the biggest day of his life. With the whole nation watching, he is just one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India’s “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”

But when the show breaks for the night, police arrest him on suspicion of cheating; how could a street kid know so much? Desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother grew up, of their adventures together on the road, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of Latika, the girl he loved and lost. Each chapter of his story reveals the key to the answer to one of the game show’s questions.

Each chapter of Jamal’s increasingly layered story reveals where he learned the answers to the show’s seemingly impossible quizzes. But one question remains a mystery: what is this young man with no apparent desire for riches really doing on the game show?

When the new day dawns and Jamal returns to answer the final question, the Inspector and sixty million viewers are about to find out (source).

The movie very realistically depicted the life and plight of the people that live in the slums in India (click the link and read the entire story):

For in Mumbai, as well as in other major Indian cities, hundreds of young children have had their arms and legs chopped off; scores of others have been blinded. The gangs also pour acid on to the children’s bodies, leaving them with suppurating wounds.

Their suffering comes down to one thing: money. In a country of 1.2 billion people, where the gulf between rich and poor is vast, there are an estimated 300,000 child beggars.

By no means all are mutilated by the beggar mafia, but those with the worst injuries do make the most money, up to £10 a day for deformed children, a fortune in a country where millions survive on just a tenth of that.

Not that Aamir and Dalbeer saw any of their earnings. After being crippled and put to work on the streets, the children are forced to hand over the cash to gang masters each evening. And if they don’t hit their targets, they are beaten and tortured.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all of these child beggars, whether mutilated or not, are addicted to solvents, alcohol and charras (powerful Afghan hashish, often laced with opium), which are supplied by the gang masters to keep the children under control.

I think my uneasiness with Slumdog Millionaire stems from the fact that for most of the people that see this movie, this is the only impression of India they will have.

Obviously, the poverty and horrible crimes in the slums do exist. No one is going to deny that. But there’s much more to India (or any country for that matter). What if you showed the movie Jesus Camp to someone who knew nothing about America? It obviously is not a representative sample. The same applies to this movie.

Another thing to remember is that India has only had its independence for just barely over 60 years. The British left the country in horrible shape, including instigating a series of wars and the Partition of India:

Partition was accompanied by one of the largest and most rapid population transfers in history, with 17.9 million people leaving their homes. Of these, only 14.5 million arrived, suggesting that 3.4 million went ‘missing’ (source).

The movie served as a poignant reminder of the idea of access as a solution to poverty which I wrote about a couple months ago:

Which forces you to think about one of the greatest challenges of humanity today: how do we close the gap between the haves and have-nots?

How is it even possible that such poverty exists alongside such wealth? How can a child  be without housing, education, health care, or any measure of security for their entire childhood?

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I feel that the world would function best as a meritocracy, but this necessitates that we have equality of opportunity… the problem isn’t intelligence, it’s access to the system.

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I was once told that those of us born with opportunities will ultimately be judged based on how we used those opportunities to better the world.

The same ideas apply to the people in the Mumbai slums as well. Unlike Western nations, India doesn’t hide its poverty. As an example, think about how shocked people were when confronted with the plight of the inner-city slums of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

In India, however, the extremely wealthy live next door to the extremely poor. When we went to India last summer, Crissy was shocked by this dichotomy, whether is was the marble-faced mansions of the rich next to the straw huts, the modern office buildings with manicured gardens next to the shanty towns, or the wealthy women draped in gold shopping on the street while starving children in rags beg nearby.

The unfortunate fact that the mafia takes all the money the kids get through begging precludes some of the obvious efforts to fix the poverty. If you give the kids money, chances are that it will be taken from them.

As the average person can do very little to fix the endemic corruption in the Indian government, the best way to help is to do charitable works to break the circle of poverty. Recently there has been a massive increase in domestic and expat contributions in the form of schools and orphanages.

It will take a while to fix these problems, but we are off to a promising start.