Nobody Likes a Tourist

Slumdog Millionaire is a movie that thrives on its gorgeous improbability, not to mention the all-singing-all-dancing talents of the most appealingly clean-cut poor people you’ve seen since your high school’s production of Oliver! But let’s not forget that it jauntily depicts some truly harrowing things—the rape and assault of our heroine, gang violence, the murder of our hero’s mother because of her Islamic faith, and the crushing poverty of nearly everyone on screen. Thank goodness for that game show, the host’s recognition of Jamal’s innate virtue and that final stroke of luck that allows him to fulfill his destiny. The problem with Slumdog Millionaire is that it ends, that you can come out of the theater thinking something has been fixed, that such luck is possible for everybody. I enjoyed the film, but this is where I get off the bandwagon. Optimism is one thing, but a contrivance of plot that removes itself so far from reality so as to overly simplify it is quite another.

The reality comes on like a champagne hangover: last summer, the World Bank estimated that approximately 42 percent of India’s population lives under the poverty line, and UNICEF now reports that 12.6 million Indian children under the age of 14 engage in hazardous occupations. Think less picturesque than Jamal and Salim giving illegal tours of the Taj Mahal, more like sweat shops and blinded singing beggars. Well over half of Mumbai’s 14 million people live in slums, including a number of the actors in the film.

But these and other sobering statistics were quoted when the movie was in theaters and the Oscars horse race. The latest Slumdog phenomenon is a media one, the “plight of the child actor” story. As the Oscars closed in, media outlets around the world reported that two of the child actors in the film were paid less than an average maid in Mumbai. Fox Searchlight’s risible defense that the kids were paid “three times the average local adult salary” is offset by the fact that “local” means the second largest slum in Asia. Then, there were garish reports of nine-year-old Rubina Ali’s father attempting to sell her for quite a bit more than the average local salary. In the last week, there have been two separate wire reports of the actors’ family homes (read: shanties) being demolished by city authorities, first nine-year-old Azharuddin Ismail and, this morning, Rubina Ali’s family was displaced. Fox Searchlight claims to have established a trust for these real-life slumdogs to get a proper education and housing—a stroke of luck nearly as improbable as winning Who Wants to be a Millionaire—but it is apparent that this is too little, too late. It seems that, in spite of their brush with stardom, these poor kids can’t catch a break.

It goes without saying that these stories are very sad, but the media is engaging in its own version of “too little, too late.” Obviously, the child actors’ family homes weren’t the only shanties demolished—Mumbai’s city government surely has better public relations sense than to single them out—but this fact earns all of one sentence in the Reuters and AP reports. Other, nameless, presumably less photogenic people have been displaced, and they do not even have recourse to a movie studio trust fund. I can see the wire services’ probable reasoning behind such a story. For one, it has a face that people can flatter themselves they will recognize, an adorable face to boot. Also, the story of the horror of the rags-to-riches kids in Mumbai is a clean “way in” to a wider story about poverty in the city’s slums. The problem with this logic is exactly that it is too clean, that there were minimal riches involved in this rags story to begin with, and that there is little follow-through coverage of the wider issue. This kind of story allows me—sitting at my laptop that cost a couple thousand dollars, in my one-person apartment that cost a couple more—to have my “shucks, what a shame” moment over coffee as I read Huffington Post and then move on to the latest in—how cute!—Dev Patel and Freida Pinto’s blossoming real-life romance.

Do these stories deserve to have been written? Sure. But that it took this for the media to start reporting on the abysmal poverty in India’s biggest city is irresponsible, not to mention cynical. The editors assume it will take the face of a kid who spent a few minutes onscreen in this year’s Best Picture to get readers interested in her plight and that of millions like her. That the media stoops to this kind of manipulation, or feels it needs to, is an indictment of our sedentary public values. Shouldn’t the fact of appalling poverty in India be almost as compelling as the improbable fiction it inspired? The twist of fate at the end of Slumdog Millionaire seems, in light of these stories and the realities they barely hint at, scarcely less cynical. In “Common People,” Jarvis Cocker sneers, “nobody likes a tourist,” and Danny Boyle—both from northern England, incidentally, a part of Britain with a considerable history of poverty—begins to seem like a guide for amoral tourism on a massive scale.

It is not art’s purpose to always be true to reality; that would be painfully boring. But one might ask the artist, in the face of realities like these, to take them a bit more seriously. None of Charles Dickens’ novels about Victorian poverty were ever as breezily nonchalant about the horrors they depicted as Slumdog Millionaire is, and readers can hear Dickens imploring them to do something about it. I would implore you, if you enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire or even if you didn’t, to make a donation to UNICEF, Oxfam, or another aid organization so that real slumdogs the world round, those that have been in the movies and those that have not, don’t need to rely on luck alone.