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NOTE TO SELF: PASS ON RENTING "SLUM DOG MILLIONAIRE"

Let's say... you're a film company who travels to Mumbai, India, to shoot a film focusing upon and that takes place in the Mumbai slums.

Let's say... you come accross some children living in the slums that would be perfect for your film and a decision is made to use them. The word "use" being the key word here.

The film becomes a huge success beyond everyone's wildest dreams and is nominated for an Academy Award. As a perk and perhaps even a promotional gimmick, the child actors are brought to the awards show all dressed up as movie stars usually are. Once the hoopla is over the young actors are returned home and back to their former lives of subsisting from day-to-day, living in shacks. One day a celebrity and now a homeless person.

Young 10-year old "Slumdog Millionaire" star, Azharuddin Ismail, was asleep when awakened and told to leave his family's home as part of a demolition of dozens of Mumbai shanties. It was among 30 shacks razed by city workers. As if that wasn't bad enough and according to Azhar, he was hit by a police officer. For their part authorities are saying that his family will be given a new home elsewhere.

Although the film earned US $326 million in box office receipts, the lives of the Mumbai "actors" haven't benefited from their appearing in the film.

"Slumdog" filmmakers set up a trust, called Jai Ho, after the hit song from the film, to ensure the children get proper homes, a good education and a nest egg when they finish high school. They also donated $747,500 to a charity to help slum kids in Mumbai.

Given this recent setback, it would seem that Azhar needs some of that charity money right away to get a roof over his family's head. Thing is - will he get it.

After early training in western classical music, Gregory D. Booth began the study of North Indian tabla drumming with Ustad Zakir Hussain in 1977. He has published widely on South Asian classical music pedagogy, processional music, and Hindi film music. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. In his book Behind The Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios, he offers a compelling account of the Bollywood film music industry from the perspective of the musicians who both experienced and shaped its history. In the original post below Booth looks at how Slumdog Millionaire and other contemporary Indian films reflect the Western world’s perception of India .

I suspect there are quite a number of people in India just now, who are very thankful the wedding season is winding down. The “high season” for weddings in northern India is mid-January to mid-February. If the Oscars had happened two months earlier, every groom in India would have reached his bride’s home to the strains of A.R. Rahman’s “Jai Ho”, the winner (if I need to tell anyone) of the 2009 Oscar for best original song. “Jai Ho” is a not A.R. Rahman’s best work (compared, for example with some of his work in the latter 1990s: Bombay, Dil Se, Taal). Nevertheless, the song and its parent film, Slumdog Millionare will represent India globally for the immediate future: in the West because it’s an Oscar-winning, well-made, happy-ending film shot in an exotic setting; in India because it’s the Oscar winner and proof, if the Indian press is to be believed, that India is now one of the formally recognized winners in the film world.

There has been earnest debate on the more intellectual Indian blog sites as to whether a film set in India, with Indian actors, directed, produced and financed by foreigners, could in fact be considered an Indian film. One of those blogs points out that this is the fourth time an Indian film has received any kind of “best film” nomination. I’d suggest that the four nominees tell us a great deal about the West’s perception of India.

1. Mother India (1957). A fully Indian production, featuring the greats of Mumbai’s film world (too early, perhaps, to call it Bollywood), in which a village matron and her two sons, abandoned by their husband/father, persevere in the face of grinding poverty, corrupt moneylenders and drought.
2. Salaam Bombay (1988) a non-Bollywood film shot in India by an expatriate Indian director, in which abandoned and kidnapped children struggle against the poverty, violence, and abuse of Mumbai’s most notorious red-light district.
3. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001), a feel-good, anti-colonialist, Bollywood film in which plucky, but unsophisticated Indian villagers, overwhelmed by British taxation, learn to play cricket and, led by one of their own, beat the British at their own game.
4. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) a British-produced and directed film with an Indian cast and setting in which a homeless, uneducated boy from Mumbai’s streets grows up to win a television game show.

Roughly, all four focus on poverty. Only one features a “heroic” Indian male. Two sacrifice many of their protagonists to poverty and “the system” and two focus on the worst neighborhoods of Mumbai. Need we say more?

The 'Slumdog' kids (the youngest cast members recall an unbelievable journey from Mumbai to the Academy Awards' red carpet) (Associated Press) - Pipes make a comeback on campus (tobacco pipes, that is. WSJ tracks a recent upward trend among college... Read the rest of this post

Slumdog Millionaire won 8 Oscars last night, but for me, the best moment was learning that all nine actors who play the three lead characters in three stages of their lives, were flown to the ceremony.

Today, they're going to a Southern California theme park (widely believed to be Disney Land)!
Then, it’s back to the slums of Mumbai.

Whirlwind preparations for their trip (passports came through on Thursday!) are detailed in this Yahoo news article:

Meanwhile, all around them the slum continued at its usual pace: Sewing machines thrummed from small, dark rooms. Women swatted flies from fresh-cut meat. Mangy dogs slept in the sun. Barbers sat in their barren shops, waiting for customers.

After their trip to the ceremony and theme park, they’ll fly back to Mumbai and the slums. How do you think this will affect their lives? How will they cope with being dressed in Oscar attire one day, only to return to their lives in shacks and lean-to’s?

I am thrilled that they were given this opportunity after playing such extraordinary rolls, but I wonder…

Today at HarperTeen's MySpace I'm blogging about weather and how it shapes my prose. A subject I likely would not have razzled up for consideration had not the ever-dear Lisa Bishop written earlier in the week and said, "How about a blog entry for our site?" Lisa and I spend most of our email time talking about movies. I just saw "Milk." She just saw "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Frost/Nixon" (both high on my list of wanna sees). Today she was telling me about "Happy Go Lucky." I hadn't known about that movie until she told me.

Imagine all the things I do not know. Oh. It pains me to imagine.

In any case, the world here went from snow to sleet to rain (to many people without power), and while I tried to capture the metamorphosis with my camera, I failed. Everything gray, meaning everything bleak, meaning no contrasts, which is what a photo needs. When I can't capture my world, I have a harder time feeling as if I've lived it. I want to go back and do the day again. Give me some vivid, I plead with someone, something. Give me some something to hold onto.

Tomorrow is another day. I'll go back out there. Intrepid.