My nieces Pinky and Ritu
Saturday I eagerly and proudly proclaimed to my husband “we are going to Slumdog Millionaire today”. It is a movie about India and everyone has told me to go see it. The thought of this movie being so highly acclaimed and up for the Oscars as “best film” gave me a sense of being a part of something big that was from India, It gave me a reason to be proud of my ethnicity, anything related to India that was so wonderful and highly spoken about brings me to a level of feeling better about who I am.
I myself want to make a film, and to see something of this caliber done and have attention on India gives me inspiration.
After sitting through the two hours glued to the screen with not a thought about anything outside of the film because it was THAT well done, a shower of relief fell over me as I realized that my story is also worthy of being told.
Two days later I phone my family who live in the slums of Kolkata India. Once we get past the usual obligatory formalities in conversation I tell my niece Pinky “I finally saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire”. I recall that she mentioned several weeks ago “auntie I really want to see that film but it has not yet come to India”. When I asked “why is it not playing in India?” She replied with “I don’t know.” She was so excited when she spoke of it and how badly she wanted to see it but this time our conversation was so different. I thought she would be so excited to hear that I had seen it and want to know all about it but instead she commented “you know auntie, they don’t want it to come to India because people here don’t like that they call the children of the slums dogs.” My mind went reeling to thoughts of oh no had I just turned my back on something so obvious and on my own people and not even realized it? Had I become one of them? The ones sitting over here in another country with no clue as to what the millions of people who live in the slums may feel like? She continued “in India we believe that all people are children of God if they are living in a slum or not.”
This was a moment of realizing that the life I live here is so far from what even my own flesh and blood live like in those slums and my perspective is from a life of being split between two realities.
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