SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

Tonight I went to see "Slumdog Millionaire" with my friend Brooks at a free sneak preview, and it did not disappoint.  This is a story set in the "Maximum City," as they call Mumbai, and other parts of India.  It is a story of survival, and it is a story of sadness.  In all the talk of "Indian Silicon Valley" and "the new India," it is easy to forget the misery in which millions of Indians live every day.  When you have a country that populous, it is also easy to lose one's sense of humanity and one's sense of the value of human life.  This movie tells the story of those whose worth has been forgotten by all but themselves.

I realize I have had a lot of "ethinic" or India-related posts in the short history of this blog.  I am not someone who wears his ethnicity on his sleeve.  Hell, I do not know my way around a menu in an Indian restaurant and certainly have forgotten the language, but I have been shaped by this place, from which I come, and my race has made me who I am in more ways than I know.  Growing up, I was always one of the few Indian kids in my class.  In my Catholic elementary school in Canada, I was the only Indian kid in my school, and I experienced open prejudice growing up in that small town (will save you the sob stories).  With the exception of 6th and 8th grades, I was the only Indian kid in my middle schools.  In high school, there were 1 or 2 other Indian kids.  It was hard not to feel foreign.

It was not until medical school, when I made some amazing friends who also happend to be Indian/Pakistani, that I realized that I was not alone (in more ways than one).  These were people who had had similar experiences as me and with whom little explanation was needed.  To this day, they are some of my best friends (Amit, Asim).  I dated a few Indian women during med school as well, which was also an experience in shared experience.  These connections and this unspoken understanding were about more than race, but race certainly shaped these people as it shaped me... for the better.  I think empathy, which is really at the heart of Jhumpa Lahiri's prose (see last post), is what binds us and what draws people of all colors to her work and to other human beings.

It is nice to have those moments in life, which remind us of what we are made, who we are, and how we are all connected.  For me tonight, Slumdog Millionaire was that kind of ride.