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Show SpecialFeatures Page 18 Monday, Aug. 24, 2009 ‘Slum Dog’ didn’t make everyone a millionaire By Emily Wax The Washington Post SLUMDOG. Since “Slumdog Millionaire’s” Oscar night triumph, 9year-old Rubina Ali has struggled to escape the slums she brought to life on-screen as Latika. She remains in the slums because her father, despite offers for a new home, isn’t sure he wants to leave. Washington Post photo by Emily Wax. Check out the new Interactive Calendar @www.AggieTownSquare.com MUMBAI, India — Never again would Azhar Mohammed Ismaill, 11, sleep in the overcrowded warren of shanties and festering lean-tos known as Garib Nagar, literally “city of the poor.” Azhar, one of the child stars of the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire,” recently moved with his family to a new home in Mumbai: a modest two-room apartment on the ground floor of a high-rise called Harmony. The apartment was a gift from “Slumdog” director Danny Boyle, whose film grossed $300 million. On the rooftop of his new building, Azhar, 11, danced as he watched jetliners take off from the airport. He recognized the emotion as similar to what his character, Salim, must have felt as he looked out over the Mumbai skyline and said: “India is the center of the world now, brother. I am at the center of the center.” Azhar’s real-life journey — and those of the other child stars in “Slumdog,” including his elfin co-star Rubina Ali, 9 — has been a roller coaster of personal tragedy and red-carpet glamour. In many ways, they are experiencing at warp speed the masala of euphoria and turmoil that India’s vast poor feel as they emerge from the iron bonds of caste and class to an era of genuine social mobility. Over two decades, India has awakened from a drowsy agricultural nation and into an industrial one that has lifted millions out of poverty. Rapid urbanization and the opening of markets has broken down feudal village roles and inspired young Indians to grab hold of new destinies in cities far from their birthplaces. Mumbai has become a magnet for a new generation of Indians, a New York of India, where professions are no longer inherited, where hundreds sleep on the street for a chance at a better life. Unlike Azhar, Rubina has not see her fortunes improve much since the movie in which she plays the young ragpicker Latika. She filmed a soda commercial with Nicole Kidman and collaborated with an Indian journalist to write her autobiography this year. But her family’s shack was demolished by city municipal workers and later rebuilt in the same spot, next to an open sewer and piles of garbage. She remains in the slums because her father, despite Boyle’s offers for a new home, isn’t sure he wants to leave. He also was caught in an undercover sting by a British newspaper where he allegedly agreed to sell her for adoption to a wealthy Dubai family for the equivalent of $290,000; he denies the allegation. The way Rubina and Azhar’s lives have diverged also tells the story of an India where some are forging ahead while others struggle and worry they will be left behind. “But to me,” said Vikas Swarup, the author of “Q&A,” a novel on which the film is based, “the most enduring image was at the Oscars, when Rubina and Azhar shared the stage with Steven Spielberg. That was the central message of the film: Whether you come from a slum or a five-star home, what matters is not where you are from, but where you are going, and that is an enormous change in psychology of Indians. “Yes, they have gone from zero to hero. Yes, they have been touched by magic. But their journey — in its spirit — is not very different from the spirit of Mumbai, the feeling across Indian cities and towns today — which is full of stories of people who are at ground zero of the great Indian dream.” Just six months ago, Azhar and Rubina were walking the red carpet at in Los Angeles at the Academy Awards. Azhar wore a bowtie and tuxedo, his hair neatly oiled. He held hands with Rubina, who wore a sea-blue princess dress with matching headband over her pixie hairstyle, her hands festooned with traditional henna. “Angelina Jolie,” cooed Azhar, recently lounging in his new home. “She was so beautiful.” “I was scared to sleep in the hotel room, it was so big,” Rubina said. Azhar and Rubina’s triumphant return to Mumbai was a whirlwind of media interviews, fashion shoots and parties with Bollywood celebrities. But in May, their lives seemed to return to normal. Normal for slumdogs, that is, since the government bulldozed their illegal tin-roofed shanties in a scene that seemed straight out of the gritty film. “They took all our furniture and broke my cellphone,” Rubina recounted on a recent day, inside the rebuilt one-room shelter that her family painted bright pink to cheer her up. “They beat my father. We thought of calling Uncle Danny, but what could he do? He was in America.” SLUMDOG: “Slumdog Millionaire’s” Azhar Mohammed Ismaill, 11, rides a bike he received from Bollywood star Salman Khan in the kitchen of the flat that director Danny Boyle bought his family. photo by Emily Wax Then her father was accused in the sting. Around the same time, Azhar’s father was hospitalized, drunk again and suffering from tuberculosis. Homeless and living under blankets and tarp, Azhar was bitten by rats and had to get medical care. “We were hit with bamboo sticks by the police,” Azhar said. “It was a bad time, when they destroyed all the shelters. I cried. A lot.” At a time when call centers and software outsourcing have become the symbols of a booming India, “Slumdog Millionaire” brought to light an equally true reality: the hardscrabble lives of many slum children of an India brimming with optimism and eagerness to be the world’s next superpower. “Nearly every child from the slums has had their home bulldozed and has a parent who has a drinking or gambling problem or has walked out,” said Ziyan Contractor, 28, their teacher at the wellrespected Aseema School, chosen by Boyle because it’s a public school where slum children attend and receive an excellent education. “Every single scene of that movie was true. The only scene that wasn’t true was when they dance on the train platform at the end. There is no space to dance on the platforms of Mumbai: only a crush of people.” Cable news host continue attacks By Matea Gold Los Angeles Times Concealed Firearms Permit of Utah 7ZXdbZ AZ\Vaan 6gbZY Logan- Thurs September 10th 6 pm-10 pm or Logan- Sat September 12th 8 am-12 pm Law Enforcement Firearm Instructor Dex Taylor Sign up online at www.CFPofUtah.com or call (435) 757-2717 NEW YORK -- Two weeks of vitriolic exchanges between cable news hosts Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann have amped up viewership for Fox News as efforts by corporate executives to strike a detente fell apart. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who face off in the 8 p.m. EDT time slot, have been attacking each other’s networks ever since news broke earlier this month that executives had sought to tamp down the personal attacks by the two men, whose sparring has long been a staple of the cable news wars. The renewed feud appears to have benefited O’Reilly, whose show “The O’Reilly Factor” averaged nearly 3.5 million viewers between Aug. 3 and Aug. 12, the eight days following the news of the supposed truce. That’s 7 percent higher than his average viewership so far this year and 12 percent more than his average this quarter, which began June 29. He also recorded more than 1 million viewers in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic twice last week, his largest showings among that age group this year. “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” pulled in an average of 1.2 million viewers between Aug. 3 and Aug. 12, down 2 percent from his year-to-date average but up P e o G o 16 percent for the quarter. Their inflamed rhetoric comes at a time when cable news has been dominated by particularly strident exchanges. The televised coverage of brawling town hall meetings over health-care reform has helped fuel angry debates on the topic. Even in that context, the verbal war between O’Reilly and Olbermann has been notably fierce. The MSNBC host has repeatedly attacked O’Reilly, whom he called “a racist clown,” while O’Reilly has been aiming most of his ammunition at MSNBC’s parent company, General Electric, which he suggested was manufacturing parts used in roadside bombs in Iraq. That prompted a furious response from GE, which called the report “irresponsible and maliciously false.” This was not the aim when Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes and General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt held a lunch meeting at Rockefeller Plaza in April and agreed to cool the tone of the rhetoric. Immelt and Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of Fox News’ parent company, News Corp., reaffirmed that commitment in May at a private Microsoft conference held in Redmond, Wash. Executives at both networks carried that message back to the two hosts, urging them to refrain from personal attacks on the air. “We were hopeful at both companies to put a more civil tone in these discussions,” said Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for GE, d ie u c pu www.a-bay-usu.com g wu UtahStatesman The w . d www.utahstatesman.com/ classifieds 24/7, easy to use, easy to find, easy on the wallet. on Friday. “No one at GE ever told anyone at NBC how to cover the news or what to cover.” But when the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times reported on the agreement between the two companies, any tentative accord collapsed. Olbermann struck first, declaring on the air he had not agreed to a truce. He went on to mock O’Reilly and lambaste Murdoch for trying to “muzzle Bill-O.” To Fox News, it appeared that Olbermann was not going to comply with his bosses. “This is now more about the extensive issues between GE and NBC than it is about Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann,” said a network spokeswoman. With Olbermann back in the fray, O’Reilly renewed his attacks on GE, accusing Immelt of using NBC News to curry favor with the Obama administration. On Tuesday, he went even further, saying he was told that the FBI suspects GE of providing a company in Singapore with radio frequency modules that were found in improvised explosive devices used to kill U.S. troops. O’Reilly noted that he could not confirm that GE was under investigation. “We are just reporting what we believe to be true,” he said. GE lashed back with a statement accusing Fox News of a “smear campaign.” It said that it does not make the radio frequency modules used in the devices or do business with the company under scrutiny. Olbermann piled on the next night. “You can talk all you want about feuds and cease-fires and childishness, but if I or any actual reporter like me had gotten as much wrong in any story as Bill O’Reilly got wrong in this one, I’d be fired in 15 minutes, as he should be now,” he said. Fox News declined to comment. The network has maintained that it will cover GE as the news warrants. On Thursday, O’Reilly noted GE’s response and directed viewers to the company’s Web site, where his supporters posted hundreds of comments praising Fox News. For now, it appears unlikely another t k works. w As of Friday, w armistice is in the there had notebeen anywfurther talks r e between the executives at the two companies about reining in the two hosts. ul Y |