Saw it Thursday night, wasn’t quite sure what to expect given the huge buzz and controversy surrounding.
Without giving away anything, I can say he knows the answers to the quiz show questions because of horrific events that happened to him, a kid orphaned at seven, then living on the streets in India.
DJ, who posts and comments here, has lived in Third World countries and says most of us here don’t really know what poverty is. Based on the scenes in Slumdog, which is unflinching in its depiction of the poverty, sickening exploitation, and crime (get rich or die trying) I agree with him. We don’t have a whole lot of orphans under the age of 10 roaming the streets here.
In a BBS video, they show the slums where two of the child stars in the movie live now. The boy’s family has lived under a plastic sheet for 10 years in a shanty town between two railroad tracks. His father has TB and says, you [and the movie] are making us look bad. The boy replies, how could any one like this dog’s life?
I’m not screaming child exploitation here. The boy was paid $3,000, which is probably a fortune to them, and the filmmakers are putting both child stars through school and plan to get their families homes to live in. But seeing the real life slums throughout much of the movie is sobering indeed.
At heart, this is a Bollywood movie. So it doesn’t end badly! Go see it. Happy, sad, gritty, and at core, triumphant.