Published on quotidianstuff.blogspot.com, on June 2nd 2009. not transferred to Wayfarer’s till today
All art, literature, film or indeed any human communication depends on us being similar to one another. If I didn’t find a point of agreement with others I would be locked in a terrible solitude. We are alike in wanting first to survive and then to find comfort. Personally I like to visualize these wants in their simplest terms, and live a simple life where I can count my blessings.
I am extremely blessed and wish the same for you, O reader known or unknown, for you are like me.This similarity extends to all other sentient creatures and perhaps insentient ones too. I confess to a fascination with all that I meet: spiders and mosquitoes in the bathroom, the black cat who sits on the fence, the snail who climbs high up the wall, almost to the roof (I’ve found out why it does this!) the pigeons who fight in my backyard, the occasional rat: all these present themselves for my inspection, as my study window overlooks the backyard, and beyond that the children’s playground, and then beyond that the road where men, women and children of all races occasionally pass. I’m not separate from any of them and if I were a Buddhist, and some Zen master asked me if any one of them possesses Buddha-nature, I’d answer “Yes!” without hesitation.
To step out of my house into this wide world is greater than staying indoors, for then I smell and hear and touch, as well as see. Also I am seen, smelled (by animals at any rate) and heard. Here in the study, looking out, I’m in a bubble of quietude, an ivory tower of privilege, but I must offer myself to the world too, for I am part of it. The black cat sometimes sees me when I look out of the window, for she sits on the fence waiting for someone, my neighbour or me, to let her in, and nothing escapes her alert senses. I don’t know what she sees or what she thinks, but suspect that she sees things even more simply than I, making no judgments except by reference to her own survival and comfort. In her place I’d be no different, even though I have the gift (which is also a burden) to see things more complexly.
Suppose there is only one soul between all of us: snail, mosquito, cherry-tree, cat, squabbling pigeons, all ages, sexes and races of humans? It seems to me that what the Hindu sages mean by “Atman is Brahman” is “What we perceive as the individual soul is actually the World-Soul”.In this frame of mind, I started to watch Slumdog Millionaire on DVD. Having never been to Mumbai, I cannot judge the extent to which it reflects the present-day city. The film’s hand-held, on-location style of cinematography surely doesn’t lie, though it shuffles the truth around quite prettily. I accept it as part of the truth of India, even though the director is Irish and the lead actor comes from London. (It seems that aspiring actors in India do body-building to look like heroes and differentiate themselves from slum-dwellers. In the UK there are no slums any more, so looking skinny and vulnerable is no bar to star roles, whatever your ethnicity.)
The soul of the film is to convey through a child’s eyes the cheerful energy animating a child’s quest for survival—and then ultimately, comfort and security. The slum is a place where the dangers are more extreme, but a child can escape them by being more resourceful—and running faster—than adults. It’s a bizarre world but we see through the children’s eyes.
The plot contrivances, and various effects which I understand have been borrowed from the Bollywood genre, are unable to mask the underlying truths, of humanity in general and slums in particular. I have read City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre, from a different decade, different city—Calcutta, different viewpoint, different author. But the slums were recognizably the same. I could pick out the similarities one by one: the physical horrors the inhabitants may endure, the cruelties of the hoodlums, the cheerful kindness of the poor who survive, somehow.
I can well imagine the indignation of civic authorities when the film versions of City of Joy or Slumdog came out. They wanted something closer to Bollywood musicals, or at least something to attract tourists and businessmen.
But this film has depths. I am not referring to the depths of depravity in which slum children are lured to become professional beggars and blinded with a spoon so as to sing more poignantly as in a famous poem by a blind saint. I mean philosophical depths, but in writing this I may cause you to yawn because that’s not what you look for in a movie. This in itself may cause you to doubt the assertion that begins this piece, that “I am just like you.” That assertion is a philosophical paradox, you see. It would be a pointless truism if the surfaces were not so different. When the black cat and I stare at one another, I think we, each in his own way, realize how unlike we are from one other. The cat seems more shallow than I, but I like to give it the benefit of the doubt, whilst ensuring the windows are not left open for it to enter my house like a cat-burglar.
But we are talking of the film’s depths. It asks the question “How do you know what you know?”, and answers: “From unforgettable experience, burned indelibly into memory”. Slumdog knows the answers through the horrors he’s undergone. That is his education.
I tend to review books or films about a third of the way in, when enthusiasm is still at its peak. It tends to wane a bit after that. A blogger friend published a book and after the first hundred pages I wrote about it in glowing terms. He took my published an extract of my words on his blog. Meanwhile I finished the book and eventually wrote a quite scathing review on Amazon.com (which mysteriously disappeared a day later). I ended up reading the book several times to try and work out why I thought so well of it initially and so badly afterwards. I came to the conclusion that Schopenhauer’s Law of Entropy applied: “If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage.” In the case of Slumdog Millionaire, sewage is rather graphically central to one incident in the plot, so, dear reader, please try and distinguish that from Schopenhauer’s metaphor.
Later, having watched the whole movie
I have to tell you that its early promise of philosophical and scatological depths is not sustained until the end, but upstaged by the romantic subplot woven into the other strands. Not to mention the tension of “Will Slumdog get a question wrong and lose his multi-million rupee prize?” I hoped he would, thus proving the assertion that he didn’t care about money: but it seems I’m in a small minority and the vast throngs of cinema-goers were granted their vicarious joy at seeing him get the money and the girl. Such a denouement left me with the banal suspicion that the girl realized she loved him when he won the rupees.
For this amateur philosopher, that teaspoon of sewage, *Schopenhauer notwithstanding, wasn’t enough to taint this barrel of fruity yet complex wine.
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