I saw Slumdog Millionaire on Christmas day. I really liked the movie. It’s about a guy from the slums in Mumbai that gets on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and he is one question away from winning and the cops come and beat the crap out of him because there is no way some poor kid from the slums would know the answers to all these questions.

The movie basically explains all the connections the kid has that enable him to know the answers.

I found out after I watched the movie that the same guy that directed Trainspotting (one of my favorite movies of all time) directed this movie. I loved Trainspotting because when I saw it I had just started college. I had, for the first time, hope that I could actually do something with my life besides waiting tables, or marrying someone just to have enough security for my kids. I got from the movie this underlying theme that materialism could numb you into a state where you wouldn’t be able to *live*, just to pay the bills and get by everyday.

I never thought about who the hell was Danny Boyle, the guy who directed the movie. I hadn’t been through any of my Info Science classes for my degree that forced us to think about who had the authority to talk about things, who had the real scoop on how a culture was so they could speak authoritatively about that culture. (I hadn’t met my friend Susan yet either…). Because that matters, should Danny Boyle be talking about poverty?

I do know seeing the little boy with the dirty tank top, mop top hair, and sticky-outie-ears reminded me very much of one of my brothers. I’m Indian (and my people are from N Georgia, not India), so just the way the kid looked was familiar. We were very very poor, but lucky in that we had both parents (and neither one drank or did drugs). So I understand this inherent belief that people who are *like that* can’t possibly have any amount of intelligence.

How many people are left behind because they are too poor to count? How much talent do we ignore because people look a certain way, act a certain way, or come from a certain background?

I have no idea if this movie did justice to India’s poor. Since it came from a Western lens, it made sense to me from my Western view of poverty. So I liked this movie.

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