Slumdog Millionaire makes Millionaires at the cost of Slumdogs

There is poverty in Bharat (misnomer: India), no doubt about that, thanks to those who have (mis)ruled the nation especially after so-called Independence. But then which country doesn't have poverty? Still the way in which Danny Boyle has exploited it in his commercial movie Slumdog Millionaire and also turned it up side down by filling it with lots of Anti-Hindu prejudice is disgusting. And those who are shamelessly lauding the exploitative movie at Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globes located in West Hollywood or nominating it at The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences's Oscars located in Beverly Hills should know that as per World Socialist Website and The Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty, the largest population of Homeless in the US live in the city they are all identified with: Los Angeles. (Source: Los Angeles: city of the stars becomes US homeless capital, Homelessness in Los Angeles County, Cartifact: Downtown Los Angeles Homeless Map)

This movie is full of Anti-Hindu prejudices that "evil" Hindus are out to get "innocent" Muslims which is a completely horrendous, mythical, nonsecular and absolutely politically incorrect point of view. A clear violation of "Revised guidelines for shooting feature films in India by foreign nationals/co-productions" and Cinematograph Act 1952 laid down by Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Govt. of India. Like Mr. Kanchan Gupta said in his article "Slumdog is about defaming Hindus" in The Daily Pioneer,

"Nor is it surprising that Boyle should have cunningly changed the name of the film's — as also the book's — protagonist from Vikas Swarup's Ram Mohammad Thomas (a sort of tribute to the Amar Akbar Antony brand of 'secularism' which was fashionable in the 1970s) to Jamal Malik."

The film also makes fun of respectable Hindu God Shri Ram to show him as "evil" who is out to kill people especially Muslims. This hurts my religious sentiments and believably so of Millions of devout Hindus in US and around the world. He shows that Hindu mobs murder Muslims and not vice versa, completely suppressing that these riots were during 1993 terrorist bomb blasts by Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar (a Muslim follower of Radical Islam now living in Pakistan, India's most wanted, 4th on the World's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list by Forbes) and that allot of Indians irrespective of their religion suffered in such heinous Muslim-Hindu riots. I say it again that any life lost because of such crimes was a life lost of an Indian irrespective of his/her religion. It should be condemned equally. Why show a bias?

It just proves that to fit the movie in west likeable square, one should fill it, as Boyle did, with Make-fun-of-India masala to make it western acceptable along with Anti-Hindu prejudice tadka to make it secularly acceptable (or politically correct) then fry it to exploit the poverty of the nation to make it socially acceptable and voilà we have an Indian poverty porn curry which will make every nationalist patriotic Hindu and Indian embarrassed and make the producers, cast and crew of the movie Millionaires at the cost of the exploited Slumdogs (which is no less than a derogatory and condescending term).

--

One Bharatiya (misnomer: Indian) channel called Star TV calls this piece of sh*t an awesome film while advertising it. In the Ad they said "एक आश्चर्यजनक फ़िल्म जिसने भारत को दिलाई एक नई पहचान" which by the way is not correct Hindi as "फ़िल्म"/"Film" is not a Hindi word and they have a audacity to call themselves a Hindi entertainment channel. What they said was that Slumdog Millionaire is "one monumental film which gave Bharat (misnomer: India) a new identity". Well in one way they are not wrong. These suckers have permanently damaged the identity of Hindus, Bharat and Bharatvaasi (misnomer: Indians) by coining a new racist term "Slumdog", which is now used every where to hate and spread bigotry against Hindus, Bharat and Bharatvaasi. Here is one such Anti-Hindu Anti-India bigot who calls himself an IT Grunt who blames all the unemployment woes in US on "Slumdog Indians". Caution: the guy is a complete looser, hater, bigot, and a good for nothing Racist.



--

Online Protest movie 'Slumdog Millionaire' by Hindu Jangruti Samiti

O Hindus, Register your protest to Censor Board against 'Slumdog Millinaire' :-

Address: Central Board of Film Certification, Bharatbhuvan, 91E, Walkeshwar Road, Mumbai 6.

Phone: (022) 2369 9255, 2362 5770

Fax: (022) 2369 0083
Email: aocbfcmum@rediffmail.com
A Thought by HJS reader

I feel every bit as strongly as you all do. But let us not underestimate the power of letters written to Oscar committee head Mr. Sid Ganis (president@oscars.org), head of Writers Guild Patric Verrone (pverrone@wga.org) and head of Directors' Guild Michael Apted (laraine@dga.org). If a steady stream of letters from proud and dignified Hindus reaches the desks of these people, it will make them stop and think.
Anil Kappor's e-mail ID & website for protest:

e mail- anil@anilkapoor.net

website- http://www.anilkapoor.net/html/index.html#

--

Slumdog is about defaming Hindus by Kanchan Gupta

In keeping with American politics of the times, Slumdog Millionaire has been nominated for as many as 10 Oscars and our deracinated media, which constantly looks for inspirational ‘good news’ stories that invariably revolve around Western appreciation of ‘truthful’ portrayal of the Indian ‘reality’, has gone into a tizzy. Saturday’s edition of a newspaper published from New Delhi had a blurb on the front page that read, “The Slumdog story: How ‘Danny uncle’ and his ‘moral compass’ created the biggest ‘Indian’ blockbuster — and why you should watch it.” Predictably, the chattering classes, who had been blissfully ignorant of Vikas Swarup’s Q and A (as they had been of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger till its perverse denigration of India and all things Indian wowed the judges of last year’s Man Booker prize) are now making a beeline for the nearest bookshop for a copy of the novel, whose title has been suitably changed to Slumdog Millionaire so that the book and the film are eponymous and both publisher and producer can encash the extraordinary hype that has been generated. Late last year, there was similar hoopla over AR Rahman getting the Golden Globe award for the music he has scored for Slumdog Millionaire. An approving pat on the back by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, it would seem, is the most important marker in an artiste’s career. Those Indian musicians who haven’t got the Golden Globe are not worthy of honour at home just as Sahitya Akademi award winners are not worthy of finding space on our bookshelves, leave alone feature on news pages or news bulletins.

.....deleted.....

Therefore, it is not surprising that Boyle’s film is about a slum where extreme social exclusion, political suppression and economic deprivation define the lives of its inhabitants. He has made every effort to shock and awe the film’s audience by taking recourse to graphic and gory portrayal of bloodthirsty Hindu mobs on the rampage — the idiom that defines India as it is imagined by the lib-left Western mind — laying to waste Muslim lives (a Hindu is shown slitting a Muslim woman’s throat in an almost frame-by-frame remake of the videotape that was released by the killers of Daniel Pearl) and property. There’s more that makes you want to throw up the last meal you had: Hindu policemen torturing Muslims by giving them ‘electric shock therapy’, street children being physically disfigured and then forced to beg, and such other scenes of a medieval society where rule of law does not exist and every Hindu is a rapacious monster eager to make a feast of helpless Muslims.

Nor is it surprising that Boyle should have cunningly changed the name of the film’s — as also the book’s — protagonist from Vikas Swarup’s Ram Mohammad Thomas (a sort of tribute to the Amar Akbar Antony brand of ‘secularism’ which was fashionable in the 1970s) to Jamal Malik. The name implies a Kashmiri connection, and we can’t put it beyond Boyle suggesting a link between Jamal’s travails — it is his mother whose throat is shown as being slit by a Hindu — and the imagined victimhood of Kashmir’s Muslims who, the lib-left intelligentsia in the West insists, are ‘persecuted by Hindu India’. Asked about the protagonist’s name being changed, Swarup is believed to have said that it was done to “make it sound more politically correct”. There is a second hidden message: The Hindu quizmaster on the ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ show has doubts about Jamal, who gets all the questions right, not because he is a ‘slumdog’ but because he is a Muslim; so he sets India’s Hindu police on the hapless boy. Swarup did not quite put it that way in his book, but the film does so, and understandably the critics in Hollywood who sport Obama buttons are impressed.

.....deleted......

--

Shocked by Slumdog's poverty porn by Alice Miles

Danny Boyle's film is sweeping up awards, but it's wrong to revel in the misery of India's children.

......deleted.......

Like the bestselling novel by the Americanised Afghan Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Slumdog Millionaire is not a million miles away from a form of pornographic voyeurism. A Thousand Splendid Suns is obsessed with rape and violence against women, the reader asked to pore over every last horrible detail. Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn.

......deleted.......

Boyle describes the film as “very subversive”. He has forestalled potential criticism about plundering another country's horror as entertainment by employing many Indian actors, including Bollywood stars and an Indian composer. Much of the dialogue is in Hindi.

That very seductiveness is the problem. But if Boyle may be absolved from criticism, I am not sure the same can be said of the audience. “Slumderful!” declared the New York Post. When we are suckered into enjoying scenes of absolute horror among children in slums on the other side of the world, even dubbing them comedy, we ought to question where our moral compass is pointing. Boyle's most subversive achievement may lie not in revealing the dark underbelly of India - but in revealing ours.

--

Day 265 by Amitabh Bachchan

On blog, comments for the film ‘SlumDog Millionaire’ and the anger by some on its contents, prompt me to say the above. If SM projects India as Third World dirty under belly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky under belly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. Its just that the SM idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a Westerner, gets creative Globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.

The commercial escapist world of Indian Cinema had vociferously battled for years , on the attention paid and the adulation given to the legendary Satyajit Ray at all the prestigious Film Festivals of the West, and not a word of appreciation for the entertaining mass oriented box office block busters that were being churned out from Mumbai. The argument. Ray portrayed reality. The other escapism, fantasy and incredulous posturing. Unimpressive for Cannes and Berlin and Venice.

--

'Slumdog' sacrifices Indian pride by Priya Rajsekar

But, for the average Indian, and the average Indian emigrant, the liberal use of stereotypes rankles. It is difficult not to squirm when, seated with a western audience, one witnesses the graphic portrayals of abuse and poverty, as though India has little else to offer. Given that India now makes more movies than Hollywood and that every year it has religiously sent in its Oscar hopefuls, many brilliant, and I dare say far better than Slumdog Millionaire, it is rather ironic that a non-Indian’s depiction of life in India is more palatable to the world than an all-Indian creation.

However, if one has read the original novel, Q & A , by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, it is hard to ignore certain deliberate and strategic changes.

Why has the name of the protagonist, a secular Ram Mohammed Thomas, been changed into an easily identifiable Muslim name, Jamal Malik?

Why not a Hindu name to go with the Hindu-dominated country?

Were the repercussions of Hindu-Muslim tensions so relevant to the central theme of the movie?

Then again, the novel itself is not so rooted in the slums and there is far less of an effort to draw attention to the sword-wielding Hindu fundamentalist.

As an unsolicited exercise in defamation, even as it warms the heart and lifts the human spirit in true fairytale style, it wilfully discourages the average tourist to India, for whom the graphic, stark images of misery will easily overwhelm any painstakingly made holiday brochure.

--

Reflections on Slumdog Millionaire by Rajeev Srinivasan

--

why slumdog millionaire is a piece of crap

--

christist Evangelist director Using Islam to Batter Hinduism