Slumdog Millionaire on The Huffington Post

Jean-Pierre Lehmann: The Post-Berlin Aftermath: Many Walls Still Need to Be Brought Down

2009-11-09T11:30:33Z

The destruction of the Berlin Wall and the global market
revolution that followed emancipated hundreds of millions of people.
Though censorship and various forms of state control persist in
different parts of the world today, never have so many people on this
planet been able to penetrate through the walls of information to gain
knowledge and connect with others. Estonians are members of the EU,
many children of the new Russian elite attend Swiss schools, while the
Chinese appear among the most visible tourists at the Olympic Museum
located in the city in which I live, Lausanne.

Yes, but. While justifiably celebrating the 20th
anniversary of the Berlin Wall's destruction and the progress made by
humanity, it is difficult nonetheless not to feel sadness. For in
truth, while the Berlin Wall may have been torn down, there remain
many walls that are defiantly standing and indeed new ones that have
been erected.

In the mid-19th century, the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli
described what he perceived as two "nations" coexisting in Britain yet
separated by a wall of mutual incomprehension: "Two nations between
whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of
each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers
in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and
the poor."

Today there may be one globe in which elites from Mumbai, Shanghai,
Dubai, London, New York and São Paulo converge to discuss common
professional interests and share the same vintage wine, while
remaining connected to their home-base with their Blackberrys or
iPhones. But there are still the hundreds of millions of people who
are globally disenfranchised, over three billion of whom do not even
have access to a proper toilet. To paraphrase Disraeli: there may be
one globe, but there are two very separate worlds between the globally
included and the excluded.

To separate from the poor, the residences of the rich are
surrounded by high and thick walls, with barbed wire, guards and
sometimes dogs, just as the Berlin Wall separated East and West
Berliners. The film Slumdog Millionaire and even more so the award
winning novel The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga show what is needed to
cross from one side of the wall to another -- crime being one of the
few options available. These walls all over the world are likely to
get higher and thicker following the crisis and the prospects of a
jobless growth recovery. In two years the numbers suffering from
malnourishment have increased by 200 million to a staggering one
billion. With the current population explosion due to continue well
into this coming decade, the prospects for tearing down the walls
between these two worlds seem increasingly remote.

Soon after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, a new wall
was being constructed over a stretch of 1200 kilometers along the
US-Mexican border. With the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the new
era it seemed to herald, the rich countries in North America, Europe,
Japan and Australia could have been expected to create a genuine
"borderless" world by bringing down the walls to people on other parts
of the globe. But that is emphatically not what happened; rather the
reverse. In the EU, the Berlin Wall came down; the Schengen Wall has
gone up, making it more difficult for non-EU citizens to get in. Just
as the wealthy have erected walls in their own countries to keep out
the riff raff, the rich countries have turned into heavily guarded
fortresses.

Just as a borderless world is distant, we are also far
from a just and open global market economy. There are many trade walls
(usually referred to as barriers). The most pernicious are the many
that discriminate against poor countries; to cite one out of hundreds
of possible examples: the tariff rates imposed by the US on imports
from three of the world's poorest countries, Cambodia, Bangladesh and
Pakistan, are respectively 16.7%, 15.3% and 9.9%, while the tariff
rates imposed on the UK and France, two of the world's richest
countries are 0.6% and 0.8% (Edward Gresser, "Trade Fact of the Week", 14 October 2009.) As these prohibitive tariffs undermine the poor countries' growth efforts, they will help ensure
that the walls between rich and poor countries will remain thick and
high. These are among the iniquitous walls that the WTO Doha
Development Agenda was supposed to eradicate. However after being
launched almost a decade ago (2001), it remains totally bogged down
with little prospect of conclusion in the foreseeable future. Not only
are old trade walls not coming down, there are signs that new ones are
being constructed.

Walls are by no means limited to geography and economic
status. More than 60 years since Partition, the wall between India and
Pakistan remains almost impenetrable (except to intrepid smugglers!).
There is only one rather desolate border crossing -- known as the Waga
Border. (The Waga Border does have its elements, however, of flourish). In spite of professing great unity, citizens of the 22
member states of the League of Arab States find many walls in seeking
to cross from one member state to the other. And there is the wall
that isolates Palestinians.

There are multiple walls separating different ethnicities,
religions and language groups. Also, though recent decades have seen
improvements in the condition of women, still there remain thick walls
between genders. As civilization advances, freedom of choice for the
majority of individuals -- where they live, where they are educated,
where and how they work, how they live -- must become a constant goal.
Thus individuals should retain the choice to live behind walls, if
they wish, but there should be no case of persons being forced to.
Until women throughout the world are given this freedom, the
gender-walls will stand out as an indictment of humanity.

Looking to the future, one can already see that the
specter of climate change is erecting new walls between states. Not
only does this apply to the politics and negotiations of climate
change, but will be even more so in respect to those vulnerable
countries that will experience -- or indeed are already experiencing -
the consequences immediately, and those that see it as a distant speck
on a very remote horizon. Walls will soon be going up to keep out
climate change refugees.

What are the implications for global business leadership?

The general forte of business has been to go around the
walls. The Berlin Wall notwithstanding, many astute companies managed
to do great business in the Soviet Union. The same applied in South
Africa during the decades of the apartheid wall; ingenious ways were
found by the astute to continue business. Japanese businessmen, for
example, even accepted the humiliation of being labeled "honorary
whites"! Going back further into history, business was also of course
able to draw benefits from the labor found behind the walls of Nazi
concentration camps.

Business philosophy has been to accept the reality of the
walls. "Pragmatism" they call it. As we are well into a new century
and able on occasions such as the anniversary of the destruction of
the Berlin Wall to reflect on where we have come from and where we are
going to, it behooves business leaders to think differently about
walls, to envisage being part of the destruction crews, and relinquish
their erstwhile position of propping up walls. This is not only
because it is the responsible and ethical thing to do; but also
because it is the only way to ensure our survival.

Jean-Pierre Lehmann is Professor of International Political Economy at
IMD, the leading global business school based in Lausanne,
Switzerland. He is also the Founding Director of The Evian Group.
Professor Lehmann teaches on the Orchestrating Winning Performance
(OWP), Leading the Global Enterprise (LGE) and the Building on Talent
(BOT) programs.

Freida Pinto And Dev Patel 'Soul Mates': Director Danny Boyle

2009-11-07T08:37:23Z

"Slumdog Millionaire" beauty Freida Pinto is so in love with co-star Dev Patel, she snubbed a string of admirers in LA on Thursday night.

'Slumdog' Kids' School Skipping Threatens Trust Fund

2009-10-29T11:16:34Z

MUMBAI, India — The slum kid stars of "Slumdog Millionaire" want a lot of things in life – new houses, a car, trips to London and Paris – but they aren't too interested in school.

Ten-year-old Rubina Ali has missed nearly 75 percent of her classes and her co-star hasn't done much better – truancy that filmmakers say will jeopardize their trust funds and monthly stipends if it continues.

Mira Kamdar: Slumdogs And Americans: Equal Opportunity Police Brutality in India

2009-10-13T15:32:36Z

Anyone who watched Slumdog Millionaire or read Suketu Mehta's Bombay: Maximum City remembers the scenes of police torture, how harrowing they were for the victims, how casually banal they were for the perpetrators. Last week, American journalist Joel Elliott got to experience this first-hand. Stumbling upon a group of uniformed cops in the process of beating up a prone individual as he returned to his New Delhi home after a late night with friends, Elliott made what turned out to be a grievous mistake.

According to his signed statement, reproduced along with gruesome photos of his injuries by the Indian news magazine Outlook, he describes his fateful error: "Startled. I shouted. When I realized what was happening to the person on the ground, I shouted again." Then, according to Elliot, the policemen turned their rage on him, striking him to the ground, continuing to strike him, pursuing him when he struggled free and ran off, handcuffing and throwing him into a police car when they caught him, taking him to what he says he only realized later was a hospital where they had a sedative administered to him apparently only to beat him the better as he was then dragged back into the car and to a police station where the beating continued. After what he estimates as six to seven hours of torture at the hands of the police, Elliott was dumped at a hospital where he spent the next few days.

At no time, despite his repeated pleas, was he allowed to make a phone call or was the American Embassy informed.

The Delhi police claim Elliott was drunk, that he -- single-handed and unarmed -- beat up a couple of the policemen, and that he tried to steal a car. Elliott claims he was trying to hide from the police in a taxi with darkened windows during the interlude when he'd managed to escape.

Let's suppose for a moment that the version offered up by the Delhi police is the correct version. Why then did the police not administer a breath test? Why did they not have a blood sample taken at the hospital as long as they were ordering needles to be poked into him. And why, oh why, did they just keep beating him up? For hours?

The short answer is because that is simply what they routinely do. Even more ominous than the tale of Elliott's own torture are the hapless Indian victims he meets in the course of his police nightmare: the unknown prone individual being beaten on the street; and a boy he describes as 17-years-old whom he sees at the station and who screams in agony as he has the soles of his feet beaten. Elliott is, after it all, a U.S. citizen and a journalist. He is now safely back in the United States. The other victims of police brutality he met have neither of these advantages. Slumdog Millionaire may have fictionalized the all too well known phenomenon of routine police brutality in India toward the poor and the unconnected but Maximum City's even more graphic scenes are nonfiction.

The city of Delhi is making a huge effort to make itself presentable to foreign tourists and guests during the Commonwealth Games it is proudly hosting a year from now. "From Walled City to World City" signboards trumpet. Slums have been cleared, fancy apartment blocks built, the Delhi Metro subway system expanded. Taxi drivers have been given lessons in basic English conversation.

In this light, not to mention the general marketing of India as a hospitable modern country where the rule of law is respected and foreigners can feel as comfortable as they would in any European or developed Asian country, someone needs to give the police in New Delhi a crash course in basic etiquette. Doesn't look good to have American journalists turn up all black and blue with a lurid tale to tell.

Consternation over the incident in the upper reaches of India's government is palpable. The Times of India has reported that Minister of Information and Broadcasting Ambika Soni is upset. I have no doubt she is genuinely shocked and embarrassed. The fact of the matter is that the powerful, the rich and the white foreigner almost never experience what Joel Elliott did and what thousands of ordinary Indian citizens do every day at the hands of India's police.

Police brutality is hardly a phenomenon restricted to India. Other thriving democracies regularly have trouble with their police caught going a bit overboard. One thinks of the tragic fate of Amadou Diallo in New York or the videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, or of the regular police abuses in France's banlieues. As in India, these are merely the tips of larger icebergs of brutality. We are shocked, shocked, shocked until the scandal dies away. Then, as the victims tend most of the time to be poor and powerless, our business -- and that of the police -- continues as usual.

"Slumdog" Lovers Make First Public Appearance (PHOTOS)

2009-08-02T17:37:24Z

They've been a rumored couple for the better part of a year, but Sunday was the first public appearance for "Slumdog Millionaire" couple, Dev Patel, 19, and Freida Pinto, 24.

Pinto split with her longtime boyfriend shortly before the Oscars, and he cited her costar as a reason. Just weeks ago the couple ran away from each other and photographers when they were spotted together in New York.

But Sunday night in London the couple smiled arm-in-arm for photographers at a special screening of the film that made them famous.

PHOTOS:

Johann Hari: Please, Dear Novelists - Get Real

2009-07-24T11:19:10Z

The Slumdog Kill-ionaire is back, and he is reminding us how exhilarating fiction can be when novelists finally leave their seminar rooms and dive into the real world. The Indian writer Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize last year for The White Tiger, a story of an Indian slum kid who rises to riches by killing his boss. Now he has followed it with Between The Assassinations, an armoury of short stories about a typical Indian city as it rises with a great heave from poverty to power (for a few).

Adiga has become great by ignoring the clichéd advice given to all young writers, which has long since hardened into a dogma: write about what you know. He is from a typical, rich Indian family buffeted by servants who are treated as invisible. He is so talented he could have made that world interesting, for a while, in its small way. He could have done what too many British and American novelists are doing, and ever more exquisitely described his own navel.

But he chose instead to write about what he didn't know -- by going out and discovering it, like a journalist. Between The Assassinations enters into the heads of a panorama of 21st-century Indians, from rich kids tossing bombs at the caste system to women steadily going blind in sweatshops to rickshaw drivers slowly pedaling their bodies into broken sinew. He learned about their lives by going out into the streets and writing about what he found.

It is a return to the great realist novels of the 19th century, when fiction captured the tectonic shifts altering our world by showing how they changed the characters of individual men and women, one by one. It's Charles Dickens in a call centre; it's George Eliot adding credit to her mobile phone.

Through his perfectly observed characters, some of the transformations of our time become clear. To name just one, the great shift in power from the West to the East takes on human form, where we can understand it best. The narrator of The White Tiger writes to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao: "Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday. I am tomorrow. This is the century of the yellow and the brown man. You and me." Yet as they wait for this new world, Adiga shows how most Indians have to sweat along, one screw-up away from destitution. As another of his characters says: "The rich can make mistakes again and again. We make only one mistake, and that's it for us."

There was a time when it seemed natural -- obvious, even -- for novelists to go out into their societies and describe them like this. As the mega-selling author Tom Wolfe says: "Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis assumed that the novelist had to go beyond his personal experience and head out into society as a reporter."

Dickens was constantly charging out into the "Great Oven" of the London night to witness its endless churn. Emile Zola went down the coalmines at Anzin so he could capture their dark dust-filled world in Germinal. John Steinbeck bought an old pie truck and drove down to live in the squatters' camps filled with people fleeing the dustbowl, and it gave birth to The Grapes Of Wrath. Graham Greene trawled across the dictatorships of the Caribbean and Latin America before writing his novels about them. George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway went to the Spanish Civil War before they smelted their masterpieces about it. Reporting didn't smother their imaginations, it fertilised them.

Yet there are so many talented young novelists I have read who seem to think the real, heaving world outside their study is a vulgar concern to be left to journalists and TV series like The Wire. They prefer to write books that ruminate on how epistemologically hard it is for "The Novel" to describe the real world, or to retreat into the stories of the distant past, or to concentrate on endless tales of middle-class adultery in Hampstead.

Occasionally, they find great work there, but I long to drag them to a run-down estate in Bradford or one of the climate change protest camps in Kent or to the club scene in Shoreditch or anywhere real and alive, to give them the best fuel for their talents.

In the 1950s it became popular (thanks to critics like Lionel Trilling and George Steiner) to say the realist novel was a dead form, belonging to the dull brickwork of the 19th century. The world now is too fast, too chaotic to be captured that way. But what could be more fast and chaotic than an Indian city at the birth of the age of the East, where a rickshaw-driving skeleton is pedaling a fat man who is merrily texting New York? Adiga makes it seem like the realist novel was designed to describe just this juxtaposition, on just this day. When it is written with skill, the realist novel is always -- yes -- real.

Wolfe, one of the great champions of the journalistic novel, warned a decade ago: "The American novel is dying not of obsolescence, but of anorexia. It needs food. It needs novelists with huge appetites and mighty unslaked thirsts for America, as she is right now." He says it would be "a revolution not in content, but in form."

The same goes for the fiction of the wider world. It's not that there aren't other great types of fiction -- I love Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K Dick, and it's impossible to imagine either of them going down a mineshaft with a notebook. But Adiga has reminded us that the big realistic novel has enough adrenaline to draw in millions of readers. His was the best-selling Booker in years, because it wasn't some abstruse literary experiment, it was alive.

There are many bold writers in the West who are still acting on these reportorial impulses, from Dave Eggers to Monica Ali to Irvine Welsh -- but there are not enough. I ran into John le Carre in the war zones in Congo, researching his novel The Mission Song, and I thought, "Where are the others?"

Wouldn't Greene have decamped to the Green Zone in Baghdad? Wouldn't Hemingway be in Helmand and Orwell in Burma -- or at least in the abandoned mill towns of the North of England? How many great novels are going unwritten today, because novelists are not being urged to make these journeys into reality?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read Johann Hari's latest article for Slate magazine - about the life and death of the Asian babe - click here.

There's an intelligent response to this by Jessica Duchen, who rightly corrects a partial error of tone in this article. There's also an interesting (highly critical) response from Sunny Singh here.

Norman Geras has a critical response here and Max Dunbar answers him really well here.

"Slumdog" Stars Dev And Freida Still Together

2009-07-23T08:06:06Z

"Slumdog Millionaire" stars Dev Patel and Freida Pinto are still together -- but you'd never guess it based on the way he avoided being photographed with her at all costs yesterday in NYC.

'Slumdog' Child Thanks Danny Boyle For New Home

2009-07-07T07:24:15Z

MUMBAI, India — "Slumdog Millionaire" child star Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail and his mother moved into their new home Tuesday, leaving behind a corrugated metal slum shanty for four solid walls, doors that lock and an indoor toilet.

"I was shocked when I saw this house," Azhar, 11, said, before turning on one of his favorite Hindi songs and dancing around the living room. "I want to thank Danny Boyle for giving us this flat."

Slumdog Child Star Finally Gets New Home

2009-07-04T08:58:16Z

MUMBAI, India — One of the impoverished child stars from "Slumdog Millionaire" will move from his shanty home in one of Mumbai's more wretched slums into a new apartment next week, his mother said Sunday.

"On Friday we got the keys," said Shameem Ismail, the mother of child star Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who played the young Salim in the Oscar-winning hit.

Danny Boyle Chides China For Movie Restrictions

2009-06-18T07:10:35Z

SHANGHAI — Oscar-winning "Slumdog Millionaire" director Danny Boyle on Thursday gently chided China for curbing free speech in cinema, but the British filmmaker said he would love to shoot a movie in the country.

Serving as jury president at the 12th Shanghai International Film Festival, Boyle told a panel discussion that it was "regrettable" that Beijing imposed restrictions on movies.

Diane Tucker: INTERVIEW: Filmmaker Havana Marking On The Dangers Of Being An 'Afghan Star' (VIDEO)

2009-06-16T08:21:39Z

All over the earth, people once danced in public. It's a universal image of joy -- like those two barefoot kids who danced in the rain during the finale of the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. But in Afghanistan, where music was banned for five years by the Taliban and was considered sacrilegious by the Mujahideen, you can risk your life dancing and singing in public.

That's why I found it so incredible that for several years the most popular TV show in Afghanistan has been an American Idol-style series called Afghan Star. Eleven million Afghans have watched this talent competition, most voting via cell phone for their favorite contestant. For many of the show's fans, it was their first encounter with the democratic process. Yesterday I spoke with journalist Havana Marking, who followed the show's third season to produce a documentary of the same name, Afghan Star. This absorbing film -- her first feature documentary -- won the Directing and Audience Awards at Sundance's 2009 World Documentary competition.

Afghan Star received a 10-minute standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival. Were you surprised by the audience reaction?

Havana Marking: I was in tears. My Afghan co-producers Saad and Jahid Mohseni and the TV show host Daoud Siddiqi were with me at Sundance, and for them to be able to see the audience reaction was a very emotional thing.

What motivated you to film this story?

HM: My father traveled to Afghanistan in the 60s when he was a hippie. Photographs of the landscape and the people were incredible. I've been trying to make a film about Afghanistan for years, but as I looked around for a story to tell, nothing seemed different enough. Then one day journalist Rachel Reid told me about Afghan Star and immediately I thought, "That's it!"

During the filming did you ever feel your life was threatened?

HM: My crew included a bodyguard, because kidnapping is an issue. That's also why we did not use a daily call-sheet. You can't have a strict schedule. This was a different way of working, but it also meant we had the freedom to pack up and follow the action. The film may not be technically perfect, but it has a spontaneity and an energy that springs directly from the conditions under which we were filming.

Everyone in the film sounded so sincere about wanting to revive Afghan culture.

HM: The Taliban exiled or killed musicians, and destroyed musical instruments. Painting, poetry, and writing were banned unless it was religious, or directly praised the Taliban. No culture can survive in that environment. But Afghans have an incredibly rich cultural tradition spanning thousands of years, and they are proud of that heritage and eager to revive it.

Compared to the poor Afghans using old car batteries to power their TVs, the TV show producers had some pretty fancy equipment, including a jib camera for high shots.

HM: The effort it took to get all those lights and that crane, it was unbelievably enterprising. Everything had to come by air from Dubai because there are no secure open roads in Afghanistan. The producers were that confident that people would love this show.

You've said that voting for their favorite singer exposed many Afghans to the democratic process for the first time.

HM: Watching young girls with only one mobile phone in the house debate about who to cast that one vote for -- it was pretty powerful. It wasn't a presidential election, but it was the idea that these girls had a role to play....that they could impact the outcome.

One of the two female finalists, Setara, was criticized for swaying a little on stage while she was singing. An older man said, "She deserves to be killed." What's behind his outrage?

HM: Setara was no Beyonce, but to Afghans she was dancing in public, and some people consider that sacrilegious. In the West we are inclined to say, "Hey, the Taliban's been gone for eight years...lighten up!" But Afghan people have seen regimes come and go for the past 30 years. They know that nothing is definite. If the Taliban returns to power 10 years from now, who will they attack? Quite possibly everyone who has danced in public.

The TV show host said in your film, "The Taliban is not important." Under the circumstances, was that a daring thing to say?

HM: Very few people would have been that outspoken on camera. The host, Daoud Siddiqi, genuinely feels he is a target now, so he is no longer in Afghanistan.

To an American, the $5,000 cash prize awarded to the winner might not sound like much, but what does it mean to an Afghan?

HM: Five thousand dollars is five times the average annual income in Afghanistan, where 50 percent of the population has no income at all. So it's a very big deal. Lema competed for the money, to help her family out of poverty. Money was less of a factor for Setara, who auditioned because she considers herself a singer and doesn't ever want to do anything else.

Will your film be shown in Afghanistan?

HM: No, although it's possible that pirated DVDs will show up there.

What don't Westerners understand about Afghanistan?

HM: Probably that democracy is not a blanket term you can magically zap onto another country. The way democracy works in America may not be the way it works in Afghanistan. Afghans want certain freedoms, but not always the same freedoms that Americans have.

Are you hopeful about Afghanistan?

HM: Yes, I still have hope, and I believe it's an important battle to fight. In Afghanistan, 60 percent of the population is under 21. The mean age is 17. These young people don't want to grow up terrified, uneducated, and oppressed. Having started this thing, the West must find a way to give this generation a chance to grow up in peace.

"Afghan Star" opens in New York City on June 26, and in Los Angeles on July 24. For a complete list of playdates, click here.

'Slumdog' Child Star Gets New, 250-Square-Foot Home

2009-06-10T07:24:02Z

MUMBAI, India — The makers of the hit movie "Slumdog Millionaire" have bought a new home for one of the two child stars discovered in Mumbai's slums.

Both children lost their homes last month when authorities demolished parts of their slum.

Brad Balfour: Doc Director Megan Mylan Brings Smile Pinki to the World

2009-06-09T14:28:20Z

The story behind the making of this year's winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary Short-- Smile Pinki --is something of a fairy tale equal to the story within the film. Pinki is a five-year-old girl with a cleft lip/palate from a tiny village in the Mirzapur District, India. It's a desperately poor place where no one even realizes a simple operation can repair her disfigurement. Then, a worker from the Smile Train organization who travels throughout India finding kids in need of this operation, gets Pinki to the hospital in Varanasi where she has the free surgery and discovers her smile.

A decade ago, former Computer Associates CEO Charles Wang and former Schell/Mullaney Advertising CEO Brian Mullaney created Smile Train, the world's largest cleft lip and palate repair organization, which became a new model for the way that clefts are treated on a global scale. After they had director Megan Mylan create a 40-minute short documenting Pinki's story, the film itself surprised everyone with its Academy Award win.

Said Mullaney, "Of the 1,200+ hospitals in 76 of the world's poorest countries that Smile Train works in, this [one in the film] is the busiest! They do more than 3,300 surgeries a year and it's run by a saint of a surgeon. We knew that with this volume we would have a great chance of casting a couple of great kids--and it worked."

So, with the Best Feature Oscar going to Slumdog Millionaire, this short enjoyed the resonate effect of being part of a very South Asian, very international year for filmmaking in the public mind. Now that HBO has started broadcasting the short--and making it available through its many distribution channels-- Smile Pinki continues to make people believe in this fairy tale, and, hopefully others as well.

Q: How did you come together with the Smile Train people?

MM: They came to me.

Q: How did they see your movies?

MM: I think Brian Mullaney and the other founders thought they had a great story that they thought would make a great documentary, so they went looking for someone, "Who do we want to tell the story?" and they really loved [my previous film] Lost Boys of Sudan. So my first reaction, honestly, was "Thanks, but no thanks, I come up with my own story ideas," and I just thought, "Well I don't do PSAs." But then they were a little persistent, and I think part of my job is to be open, as is yours, right? You've got to be open to what people are trying to tell you.

Q: I had a friend who had a cleft palate as a kid.

MM: That's one of the things; clefts weren't on my radar, besides ads you see in the Sunday paper. I thought of it as something cosmetic. But once they sent me some stuff and I started realizing how common it is, how devastating it is beyond its speech and ability to eat, and the tremendous social ostracism. And then, how totally curable it is.

Q: What's great about the organization, is that they've found something where they could have a huge impact, with something that had a clear and unmistakable goal and resolution.

MM: Exactly.

Q: So rather than try to cure all the world's ills with some kind of large organization, they figured this out.

MM: The other key piece for me about their strategy is that they support local doctors. It's wonderful when Americans choose to go abroad, and we should all give our time, but that's not the way you solve problems. You've got to empower the local people. If all of that had not been in place, I probably still would have done it, but the organization intrigued me.

Q: And it was a chance to go to India.  

MM: Exactly. I thought it was a good story. It has the natural structure to it, so as a storyteller I thought, "this is a good story." And they had the funding in place, which seriously, that's the worst part of my job. If I never did that ever again, great.

To some degree having to convince people your idea is a good idea is a good filter for people not going off and making every story under the sun, but it's thankless. That's probably the piece the Oscar helped with the most; not convincing people to fund me, but when I open rejection letters or I get a rejection email, I can say to myself, "Okay there was a moment where people said yes." Because it's constant, it's constant.

Q: And you've been making films before this.

MM: I've been making independent documentaries for about 15 years and this is my third or fourth that I've directed, depending on how you count my first film which didn't get much of an audience. This is actually the first short I've done and it's a 40-minute one. The other two were features and one is still in production. But Lost Boys of Sudan... Jon Shenk and I co-directed that.

Q: I loved that movie.

MM: Oh good; I did too. It was such a life experience. Jon actually was one of my DPs on this film.

Q: How do you, as a doc director, separate yourself from the subjects you cover? With Lost Boys... you built relationships that you don't suddenly turn off. And with Smile Pinki, how do you divorce yourself from these little kids?

MM: I don't try to separate myself. It is an odd relationship you have because in some ways it's very much a friendship, especially with the kinds of films I make. If I have a strategy, it's [shooting] vérité so it's finding people who are going through these life-transforming moments.

Q: And you're dealing with younger people.

MM: Exactly. So you're with these people at these transformative moments in their lives and I'm just very clear that I'm a human being first and a filmmaker second. I don't think that those [two things] have to be in conflict. I don't need to film every single moment and I try and be really clear with my subject that if they say stop, I stop.

If you give people that [control] and they actually believe you, they can test you out once or twice and if you really don't film, then it just becomes where they trust you and you're along for the ride and part of the experience.

We always felt with Lost Boys..., those guys were going through such an intense experience, and part of it was having these two filmmakers along for the ride. They didn't know any different that you could come to a new country and not have a filmmaker as part of that experience. And I think, to some degree with Pinki, that might have been [the case] too.

Q: And these kids like Pinki are younger too.

MM: Yeah, she's much younger. Actually, in a lot of ways, even though [the Lost Boys] were Sudanese refugees who spent their whole childhood in a refugee camp, those guys were much more savvy about the ways of the world. Though they had gone through such hardship and experienced genocide as six year olds, they had BBC radio and knew what airplanes were and all of that.

Pinki's village is really the most isolated thing I've ever been in touch with. Neither she nor her father had ever been to town. She had never left that village and he had never been to that city, which, by car was only two hours away, and by their transport, only a few hours away, and here he is, a 27 year old man. And with her mother, one of the really challenging things was communication with them. The language level was tricky.

Q: What dialect do they speak?

MM: They speak Bhojpuri, which is a dialect of Hindi. So my field producer, who's from Delhi didn't even speak it, so we had to work through these layers. She would talk to the social worker--there are very few people who speak both English and Bhojpuri; there are a lot of people who speak Hindi and Bhojpuri, or Hindi and English, but not the whole chain, so you had to go through this.

Actually Dr. Subodh, the surgeon, is one of the few; he grew up in Banaras, but was sort of busy. Yet, often, he'd be translating for us at the same time he was doing the surgery and everything.

Q: It's a good thing that the surgery is relatively basic.

MM: And he does it all the time. So the communication with her family--to try and get that level of trust and explain to them what my mission as a filmmaker was, what my motivation in telling their story was--they had no concept even of what a movie was. Her mother could not wrap her head around the idea that I was a foreigner.

She can sort of understand Hindi, so said to my field producer, "There are people who speak Hindi and that's not what I speak, but I understand," and then she pointed at me and was like, "why is she talking like that?"

We finally realized that she didn't have the concept of a foreigner, that there's a world out there. So how do you find common ground with that? That was a big challenge.

Q: How did people there deal with someone with a cleft palate? How many people in that village had a cleft palate? Was she the only one?

MM: She was the only one. Her village is probably only 75 people; it is quite small. I think that especially with the film, it seems like every other child has a cleft, but it is very common in India because there's so much malnutrition and poverty; the poorer the country the higher the incidence.

Q: Do they have any idea what causes it?

MM: They don't know exactly; Brian [Mullaney] can tell you more, but they know that it's linked to prenatal nutrition and the health of the mother. The less wealthy the mother, the higher the incidence. It's sort of woven in there, and there's a genetic component too.

There's estimated to be a million children in India with clefts, but there are over a billion people in India, so it's still a bit of a needle in a haystack to find these kids. The poorer the mother the more likely and they are very isolated. That's one of the things I like the best, is when there's that big coming-together registration day and these kids are like-- and you can just see in their eyes--"I'm not the only one."

They had never seen anyone who looked like them. All around the world, I've come to learn, there are different superstitions about this [condition] and very much so in India. It's the eclipse or that the mother was cutting vegetables and you're not supposed to do that and the gods have punished you. So this child is born as a punishment to their family and village. That's how they're seen.

Q: Is there anywhere that thinks highly of them?

MM: Not that I've seen. Wouldn't that be great?

Q: Well I've read, that with one group certain cleft children are viewed as a pariah and with other communities they are viewed as a blessing--there were different kinds of cultural responses to this particular condition.

MM: One of the things I hope comes through in the film, and I feel like you see really clearly, is that Pinki's family really prized her. She was very much a loved child even though she had to deal with this ostracism and ridicule from the village and the other kids.

Q: Even though it's a 40-minute long film, how long did you work? How deep in can you get when making a 40 minute movie of a specific organization and act; it must arouse your curiosity so much that you want to cover all of India.

MM: There are endless stories in India, of course. That town where we were filming in, Banaras, is one of the holiest cities in the Hindu religion, so I went into it very similarly as to other things. With Smile Pinki as I did with Lost Boys--as I have with all films I've worked on for other people--it's sort of a gut, organic feeling for what's the story, who's the person going through this intense thing; it's character-driven, I get as close to them as possible for the big moments.

With Smile Pinki the length and the structure was very natural; the journey story. Lost... was a journey story too, but it was about life here and at what point do you say, "Okay... enough." The hard thing with Lost Boys, was to know when to stop, because their lives are still going on, we could have just kept going and going and going.

 Q: You had to find a moment.

MM: We could feel there was a point where they plateaued is sort of a negative, but the transitions and the big steps forward got smaller and smaller [as we went along].

Q: Was Pinki easier in that way; did you decide on Pinki because she had the perfect name for it?

MM: Isn't it a great name? The funny thing is Pinki doesn't mean "pink" in Hindi, you know.

Q: Did you give her pink clothes after the film?

MM: Well Sheila [Nevins--president of HBO's documentary division] gave her a bunch of pink clothes when she came to visit; all sorts of adorable pink stuff and I brought her back clothes and stuff.

Q: They were here in New York?

MM: Yeah, they were, it was great. They came for the Oscars.

Q: Did they go to the Oscars--Pinki and her family?

MM: Yeah, it was pretty crazy, I can show you some pictures.

Q: Did you videotape all of that? Come on, you must have documented it.

MM: No...

Q: Are you nuts?

MM: I know. We photographed a lot, but we didn't videotape. I wanted to go through the experience. I know, I know, I'm not a real documentary filmmaker.

Q: The DVD extras!

MM: We have a little bit, and they got a hero's welcome when they went back home. They met with the Prime Minister and all that stuff. It was pretty crazy.

Q: Isn't it weird to have it happen in the same year as Slumdog Millionaire?

MM: Oh, it was very much India's year and I think we benefited a great deal. The film's a huge deal in India, which is bizarre for a short documentary to be like this--every time they would mention Slumdog they'd mention Smile Pinki too. And the day after the Prime Minister congratulated the filmmakers of Slumdog Millionaire they did so with Smile Pinki like in the same breath.

Q: Did you meet the Indian Prime Minister?

MM: Well I haven't gone back , but they did. Pinki, her father and Dr. Subodh--who all came to the Oscars--all met the prime minister and the president. And Pinki, there's these mega Bollywood stars who have signed on now to be part of Smile Train. There's a scholarship for her.

Q: You heard about the Slumdog kids.

MM: Yeah, and she's had just the opposite experience. From what I've read, and I don't know anything first-hand, it sounds like Danny Boyle and those folks tried to do the right thing too. Like we [Americans] can't wrap our head around honor killing or anything like that so you have to try to get into that reality. Not that any poor family wants sell their child, that's a horrible thing, but you have to see it in their reality, not ours, right?

Q: [Having filmmakers come there] must be like having aliens from another planet drop into the middle of their society.

MM: I know, I know. And those kids [from Slumdog] were for sure more savvy than Pinki. Her coming here was just... First I thought, "Oh this is sort of icky. America's weird enough, and you're going to bring her for the Oscars?"

Q: She has no idea! She's never seen a movie. But by now she's seen movies...

MM: Well, no, still, they've only seen the movie that they're in.

Q: Did you guys take them out to some of the parties?

MM: Oh yeah, we actually went to a Slumdog Millionaire party the night before because they were staying at the same Four Seasons.

Q: They must have appreciated the level of stars they were meeting.

MM: Well no, see that's the thing, which is great. I got a translator just for Pinki and her dad, because Dr. Sabodh can speak English and everything, so the translator told me that they met the guy who was the host of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?--Anil Kapoor. He's a huge huge deal, right?

Q: He's like a Robert DeNiro or something.

MM: Right, and so then right after they met, [the translator] turned to Pinki's dad and said, "Did you know who that is?" and he said, "No, but I know that I'm meeting very many important people in America." He had no clue who the guy was.

Q: Do they have electricity?

MM: No, but some nice concrete things have happened for them. The district government has made Pinki's village a model village, and so new housing's gone in with corrugated roofs that can withstand the monsoon, and electrified water pumps, and the roads have been reworked.

So here's this child who was this ostracized scar on the village and now there's a lot of talk about her being blessed and bringing all this good fortune to the village, and it's great. There's been a ton of press coverage in India about her and the whole Oscar thing, and I saw this interview with her mom, the same mom who couldn't wrap her head around me being a foreigner, she said "We've already got our gift, it's not about the prize and America. All of these people who are now celebrating my daughter's success are the same ones who were ridiculing us." And I was like, "You're a good mom!"

for more of Brad Balfour interviews, go to filmfanwriter.blogspot.com

'Slumdog' Child Star Rubina Ali Gets Book Deal

2009-06-05T13:25:03Z

LONDON — One of the child stars of the Oscar-winning movie "Slumdog Millionaire" is to publish her life story.

Transworld Publishers says Rubina Ali's book will tell the story of her life in the shantytown where she grew up.

Jonathan Daniel Harris: A Cause for Comedy: A Cause for Mild Alarm

2009-06-05T13:07:29Z

Another day in the Obama Administration, another day closer to joining the inevitable Islamofascist caliphate that's destined to absorb us. This is what happens when you preach socialism to a nation of hard-working, sacrificing individuals.

How can one be both fascist and socialist? Sigh...what a question. Go stick your nose in some Proust, you hippie.

Just when I thought we had a few freedoms left in this frog-kissing, Arby's-hating, dystopian reality, in steps a new initiative that makes universal health care look like waterboarding.

It's called A Cause For Comedy. No, no, don't laugh yet. The name itself isn't supposed to be funny. Here's the concept. A bunch of idealistic flower people put down their peace pipes for one minute and decide to host a comedy show. You, the sucker, go and shell out $10 of your hard-earned scratch to watch an hour of penis jokes or something. Here's the communist part: they take the money earned from the show and give it to some not-for-profit organization!

Excuse me, KC and the Sunshine Band, but when I pay for a piece of entertainment, whether it be Toby Keith at the Home Depot Center or An Evening with Michelle Malkin, that money should go in the performer's pocket. If I wanted to save a family of whales or create the world's largest friendship circle, I'd do it on my own damn time. This forced charity almost makes me regret the $0.48 I put in that display for breast cancer something-or-other at the Safeway.

So A Cause For Comedy or The Jaws of Tyrany as I call it, purports to raise thousands of dollars for their featured nonprofit. The entire event is organized by Causecast, an extremist group of bleeding heart hippies. This month's event will be at the Hollywood Improv on June 11th and their organization of choice is NextAid. This fringe group claims to "implement innovative sustainable solutions to the challenges facing African children." A likely story. What about the challenges facing me? $7.99 for a 12-pack of Mountain Dew? Gimme a break!

I think it's important for everyone to know about this scam. In fact, I encourage you to go there next Thursday! That's right, I think you should actually go and see for yourself what excessive liberal rubbish these so-called "entertainers" will be spewing out at the Improv. Or, at the very least, watch them display their demonry on a live futuristic computer box broadcast:

Performing at the show: two Jews named Ben Morrison and Dan Levy, Daryl Wright, Bryan Callen, J Chris Newberg, and Whitney Cummings.

This is it, America. You must make the decision. Will you throw your money at A Cause for Comedy, sponsored by the deceptively attractive Marxists at Causecast, or will you stay true to the American spirit of selective generosity? The choice is yours.

'Slumdog' Kids Visit Hong Kong, Hope For Disney Visit

2009-06-05T06:51:39Z

HONG KONG — The child stars of the Oscar-winning movie "Slumdog Millionaire" traded the shanties of Mumbai for Hong Kong's skyscrapers Friday as they arrived for a charity fundraising performance.

Photographers swarmed Ayush Mahesh Khedekar, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail and Rubina Ali as they arrived at Hong Kong's international airport, with 10-year-old Azhar riding on their baggage cart.

'Slumdog' Star's Shanty Spared In Another Round Of Demolitions

2009-05-30T08:31:38Z

MUMBAI, India — City authorities demolished the homes around the recently rebuilt shack of "Slumdog Millionaire" child star Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail but left his standing Saturday.

A bulldozer and about 30 men leveled about 18 shanties in the section of the Garib Nagar _ "city of the poor" _ slum where Azhar, 10, and his family live. They left another dozen partially standing.

'Slumdog' Filmmakers Meet With Poverty-Stricken Child Stars

2009-05-27T08:36:17Z

MUMBAI, India — The makers of "Slumdog Millionaire" met the film's two impoverished child stars on Wednesday and reassured them they will soon have new homes. But the father of one of the children stormed out, saying the filmmakers have not done enough to help.

Rubina Ali, 9, and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, both lost their homes this month after city authorities demolished parts of their slum in Mumbai. Rubina has been staying with relatives and Azhar has been living in a makeshift shanty of tarps and blankets with his parents.

'Slumdog' Kid Falls Sick, Search For Homes Intensifies

2009-05-23T07:23:09Z

MUMBAI, India — The search for new homes for two impoverished child stars from the hit movie "Slumdog Millionaire" has intensified, as one child fell sick days after city authorities demolished the shanty where she lived, family members said.

Nine-year-old Rubina Ali came down with a fever Friday and spent a few hours in a local hospital, they said.

ANOTHER 'Slumdog' Star's Home Torn Down, Her Father Beaten

2009-05-20T08:00:29Z

MUMBAI — The 9-year-old girl who starred in "Slumdog Millionaire" dodged pieces of falling debris Wednesday as she tried to salvage twisted metal and splintered wood _ all that remained of her bubble-gum pink home after authorities demolished part of a city slum where she lived.

Months after their movie swept the Oscars, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, are both sleeping on hard dirt, wondering when they too might go from slumdog to millionaire. Azharuddin's home was demolished last week.

Parvez Sharma: India Shining? Not Quite.

2009-05-19T11:02:12Z

As a proud member of the Indian diaspora, I used to think that the world's largest democracy was also its most sophisticated. Now, I'm not so certain.

India just voted for its fifteenth Lok Sabha or "People's House." If there is anything to be learned from this largest exercise of franchise on the planet, the always-insular US media are certainly not interested in reporting it. Carrie Prejean's vacant mind gets more news time here.

As an Indian Muslim and a former journalist who used to cover the heat and dust of this remarkable spectacle of democracy, a part of me is happy that the self-proclaimed standard bearer of "secularism" -- the Congress Party -- has defeated the Hindu nationalist and anti-Muslim BJP. But huge problems remain.

As always in India, it's about staggering numbers. 700 million of its 1.2 billion masses were eligible to vote and close to sixty percent did. Once again the world's largest middle class remained largely apathetic with the poorest of the poor in rural outposts voting with greater gusto. The Congress re-embraced its cause for the Aam Admi or Common Man. For the BJP in 2004, "India Shining" was the theme song. For the Congress, the Slumdog Millionaire anthem "Jai Ho" was seen as a better formula for success, with the entire nation gripped by the Oscars' finally deigning to acknowledge the bastardized Bollywood of that film, never mind if it was not an "Indian" film or had been accused of "poverty porn" by the intelligentsia.

India's frantic, disorganized and often elitist English-language media even dubbed Vote 2009 as Election 2.0, with hopes that Facebook and Orkut would Obama-ize their election as well. That was not to happen.

My home country and its politics are complex, to say the least. Many different Indias now jostle for space in the increasingly urban settings of air-conditioned shopping malls and the shantytowns and slums that surround them. Election time is perhaps the greatest equalizer. But dig deeper and you find that the dynastic politics of the subcontinent remain unchanged, for the most part.

The family you are born into makes all the difference at election time here but unlike Pakistan, where it turns into a kind of feudal chaos with no real democracy, India has had 15 successful elections since Independence or Partition in 1947. The newly elected caste of characters is as colorful as ever and includes mothers, fathers, sons and daughters in the highest numbers ever. Politics in India is a family business.

Among the hundreds of politicians braving the heat and dust of this vast nation in their air-conditioned Ambassador cars (this sturdy elephant of a vehicle has been synonymous with political power in India since 1957) were 38-year old Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka, with the former whipping up a media frenzy every time he opened his dimpled mouth and was proclaimed India's Obama. Like Obama, Rahul is mixed-race. His Caucasian, Italian, Roman Catholic mother is today India's most powerful woman. In 2004 she was ridiculed for her roots and her accented Hindi (and English) but this widow of the "martyred" Rajiv Gandhi (a former prime minister) and daughter-in-law of the also assassinated Indira Gandhi, having already inherited the dynastic mantle of the President of the Congress, renounced prime minister-ship and gave it to a soft spoken Oxbridge-educated Sikh economist who had been credited with ending the socialist economic principles of previous regimes when he was a Finance Minister. Dr. Manmohan Singh, now 77, had never run for political office and was therefore not seen as a threat. Today, having held just one press conference in the last five years, he is seen as a stable, if puppet-like (with La Gandhi pulling the strings), alternative to the rantings of the Hindu nationalist BJP and often waxes eloquent about "secularism," seen by the Congress to be the very heart of the Indian nation state crafted after 1947.

It is no accident that in remarks to the Press right after the election results were announced, Singh rushed to thank Sonia and Rahul, grateful to them in a cloying way for his very existence. He takes all his orders from them, after all. The noisy and often hysterical television news channels had pundits claiming that Rahul would be anointed Prime Minister in as little as two years after Singh made him a Minister in his soon to be announced cabinet. It is hoped that in two years, at age 40, Rahul will have the sagacity for the highest office, apparently a birthright.

The media is also agog with the news of New York writer and former UN official Shashi Tharoor, who lost his bid for Secretary General, getting a cabinet post. Mr. Tharoor descended upon the state of Kerala, not speaking the language and appealing to the masses as Mr. Clean from someplace else. His patriotism rediscovered after a lifetime of living abroad, he now hopes to bring "Change." To his critics he is a firangi (a pejorative for "foreigner"), just like Madam Gandhi.

India is by no means a two-party system like the US, and this was the primary reason I used to attribute a superior democracy to it. But in 2009 many regional parties -- and there are more than a hundred -- have seen erosion in their support. The nouveau riche middle classes, however, are glad that the Communists, who had a strangled hold on the Singh 1 government, have been soundly defeated. Even the party of the downtrodden and "Dalits," the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) or Majority People's Party, have seen losses -- even though polls had predicted that its leader, a mostly uncouth woman called Mayawati, would have played kingmaker this time.

The keys to power are often given by India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, the heart of the Hindi heartland and an often-accurate predictor of electoral tides. With a population equaling Brazil, UP this time was a surprise. The Congress here has made remarkable gains in areas where, much like the pre-Obama Democrats in the Bible-Belt states, it had given up all hope. For the first time in many years, it has 21 winners from here and is viable in the heartland again. It is unfortunate, though, that Uttar Pradesh ("UP" for short) is sending 31 MP's with criminal records to Parliament, which will now have an astounding 150 members who are also criminals. Above all, I remain conflicted to learn that the Muslims of UP, the most coveted voting block in that state, have voted predictably for the Congress, even though it is clear that they cannot vote for the BJP.

A quick look behind the numbers is instructive. The BSP fielded 14 Muslim candidates, two won. The second regional party, the Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party) fielded 12 and all lost. The Congress had the least Muslim representation on its ticket at 9, and only two won. The losers (the BSP and the SP) argue that the final vote share means a return of the Muslim vote to the Congress. Others say that the Muslim vote remains fragmented. For me, Muslims not voting for Muslim candidates presents an interesting phenomenon and the hold of dynasty (the Gandhi's) on the Muslim voters (like others) remains unchallenged.

BJP head honcho, LK Advani, the angry old man of an all encompassing "Hindutva" ideology is now 81-years old and much like the Republicans in the US, the BJP in India is floundering for a message beyond religious rhetoric to appeal to a forward looking, outsourced-and-loving-it population. His party amongst others is sending another Gandhi dynasty offspring Varun Gandhi to parliament. In prison recently for his hate speech, this young Gandhi said that the "Lotus" (symbol of the BJP) would "cut the head of Muslims".

In 2004, when the BJP was first defeated, I felt a sense of optimism. It was a vindication, I felt, for us Indian Muslims, massacred by a BJP government in the state of Gujarat in 2002. It was a remarkable moment indeed. A Sikh man (Manmohan) was anointed to power by a Roman Catholic woman (Sonia) and administered the oath of office by a Muslim President (APJ Abdul Kalam).

Now, as the circus of this prolonged election ends, I am not so sure. I know that Muslims remain a much-courted voting block and, at 13 percent, give India the world's third largest Muslim population. This year, more than two-dozen Muslim parties contested the election. Many said this was evidence of a fifty-year healing process after a bloody partition into a majority Hindu and majority Muslim nation. But Muslims remain India's most reviled minority, often in a state of poverty and illiteracy, and certainly the targets of "racial" profiling, ending up as prison majorities, much like African-Americans in the US prison system. The damning Sachar Commission report in 2006, initiated by the outgoing and now incoming Congress government, was seen as a way to identify the problems of the Indian Muslim. It did. But two years later, little has been done.

Ironically the loser BJP is already proclaiming that it "should have courted the Muslim vote" in Uttar Pradesh, where the largest Muslim populations live. How it could have done that is perplexing. Picture the Republicans trying to get pro-choicers to vote for them.

And these are only small symptoms in this land of a billion inequalities. The nation continues to obsess about certain "superpower status," which they see as only a matter of time to come. Poverty, dynasty and minorities be damned, they say. India has what China (and certainly the inconsequential Pakistan) do not. And that itself is a reason to celebrate.

'Slumdog Millionaire' Kid Ayush Mahesh Khedekar Does Cannes

2009-05-18T18:24:19Z

While his costars remain in the Mumbai slums nearly three months after their collective Oscar triumph, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar walked the red carpet in Cannes Monday night.

Ayush, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail played the three main characters of the film at their youngest. Since the Oscars, Rubina and Azharuddin have returned to their life in the slums, with Rubina's house flooding with sewage and her father supposedly trying to sell her, while Azharuddin has gotten sick and had his home demolished.

Ayush is from a more prosperous background, and recently signed on to a new film, "Shyam's Secret," and is promoting it in Cannes for five days. See below for recent photos of all three.

PHOTOS:

Lee Camp: WATCH: Slumdog Millionaire and the Hollywood Fairy Tale

2009-05-14T18:38:28Z

'Slumdog' Child Star's HOME Torn Down By Authorities

2009-05-14T07:52:58Z

MUMBAI, India — The 10-year-old child star of "Slumdog Millionaire" was awakened Thursday by a policeman wielding a bamboo stick and ordered out of his home. Minutes later it was bulldozed along with dozens of other shanties in the Mumbai slum he calls home.

"I was frightened," said Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who lost his pet kittens in the chaos.

L'Oreal Signs Freida Pinto And Evangeline Lilly

2009-05-13T10:04:58Z

L'Oréal Paris has signed Slumdog Millionaire actress Freida Pinto and Lost star Evangeline Lilly as its latest A-list representatives, it was announced last night ahead of the 62nd Cannes opening ceremony.