Slumdog Millionaire

So it was by pure chance that I stumbled across a Youtube video of local Harrow lad, Dev Patel on the Ellen DeGeneres show. I have a soft spot for Ellen DeGeneres by the way. I think she's the cat's pyjamas and pretty damn funny to boot. He wasn't exactly very good looking. A tad too thin and not to mention extremely boyish (hello....18!), but he had the most fabulous British accent AND I came to realise that he was the star of the much talked about Slumdog Millionaire which had scooped up a bunch of awards at the Golden Globes.

The storyline sounded pretty interesting so I decided to d/l it to have a watch. While waiting for it to finish, Zhin and I discussed bits of the movie and other things on MSN, but the one thing I remembered distinctly was being completely aghast when my file finished downloading and I opened it up only to realise one glaring point I had forgotten. It was a Bollywood film. Well, not exactly Bollywod per se but it was based in Mumbai and obviously it had to be as authentic as possible, so for the first part of the film, the language spoken was their native one, and for the second part, they spoke in accented English. I remember complaining to Zhin about Dev's own real life accent being masked and how horrendous that was, and I went to bed rather disappointed.

I brought myself to watch it again today, however, despite my phobia for Bollywood films, and to my surprise, I was rooted for the entire movie. I have the shortest attention span for movies - couldn't even take an hour of 'Burn After Reading'. But the authenticity of the film being shot in Mumbai.....the conditions of the slums....the children running around, the vast number of people there actually were in India.....the harsh reality of a Hindu-Muslim riot that killed a mother and left 2 boys orphaned, were all that tantalising for me. My heart wept when I saw the people who had to resort to picking up trash from the dumpsites as a source of income, or the women who had to do their washing in a river that was murky with pollution. I cringed on the edge of my seat in horror when I realised the true ulterior motive of the man asking a bunch of children to rehearse their singing, choosing the best songbird amongst them only to burn their eyes out so that they could beg on the streets as blind singers.

The love story that constructed the core of the movie was mediocre at the best, but the reality that was India opened my eyes to a whole new level, and made me aware of how, whether we liked it or not, some things were not fair in life and they never would be. We would always be stratified into different classes of society, whether we liked it or not, and there wasn't much we could do to change that. It made me so sad, however, that I had everything under the sun within my grasp while some individuals just miles away had to fight so hard everyday just to put food into their mouths.

I say this too much already....but c'es la vie, ain't it.

On a happier note, Happy CNY to all.