A REVIEW FOR THE SAKE OF REVIEWING IT.

Written on Facebook on April 13, 2009 that welcomed 19 comments. :)  Please click the link :  http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=91573975897

I liked Slumdog Millionaire for the following simple reasons and I had no intention to rationalize it too much:

1. I understood Indian culture really well.
2. The actors played their roles at their best.
3. The plot was more not on what you see on screen but on the unseen possibilities that can come to someone who’d had so much suffering in his life.

The popping of Arvind’s eye out was a representation of cruelty to children. Nitin, my Indian friend who’s based here in Manila, told me that it was one of the scenes he considered ridiculous in the film - as far as he knew,nothing like that was ever happening in India. But who are we to know?

On my birthday last week, I was in a conversation with some friends and told them about what Nitin shared with me. Goo said it probably hasn’t happened in India but how evil people can do cruelty to children and make them beg for alms in the streets probably was the reason why it was shown that way.That was the situation in the form of exaggerated scenes in the film such as taking off the eye of the small boy. He added that for all we know, such violence really occurred - only, no one has come up to tell the tale. I’d like to hope there really was no such truth in it.

I’d say Salim and Jamal were victims of violence . Their wretched childhood was formed in mishap - perhaps, too tragic to believe. I know little of the discrimination BETWEEN all religions in India ( Hinduism, Punjabi, etc…) and Islam - but when I was there, I had observed how the majority considered our Muslim brothers a distinct community. Perhaps in the recent days, Indian society had accepted them openly but in Slumdog Millionaire, it was traumatic. They were alienated. When their mother was killed, I believed it was back in the 70’s when Amitahb was still young ( Now, he had aged and still is one of the greatest actors of Bollywood.)

Further so, the power of destiny portrayed between Latika and Jamal made my heart shrink! Oh, tell me about being a hopeless romantic. Their story was violence-stricken, that if you relate yourself with it and make-believe that it was also happening to you, you’d wonder how you would have survived . Everything was uncontrollable, beyond their freedom to say NO to it. It was manipulated by the hopeless situation they were in that led them to such tragedy. I didn’t think they ever had freedom at all until Jamal won the 20 million Rps. and Salim had to sacrifice his life for them after asking Latika for forgiveness.

Wow. I still felt the enormous grief in the make-believe lives of the characters. The film, in itself, was high-strung from the beginning till the end credits when it said,” D. It was written!”
Note: Anyone who has feedback to correct the facts that I may have represented incorrectly specifically that on Muslims in India, please feel free to comment. Thank you!

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