4.21.2009

Slumdog Slave Sale

After Slumdog Millionaire, the little girl star was almost sold into slavery by her father. And let's not kid ourselves, it wasn't to work as a maid. The supposed buyers were actually reporters from a British tabloid.

Now the father/pimp insists that he was set up, and the girl supports her father, albeit not very convincingly.

While a wonderful experience for the kids, it is also a trap for them. People around them are going to get greedy and jealous and try to cash in or exploit the new-found fame. And once the children see what life is like outside their slum, they want something different for themselves.

"I want to live somewhere it doesn't smell like poo," said the girl in one recent interview. Imagine that as a life goal.

This story is almost as bad as what happened to the kids in The Kite Runner. They were paid a few thousand dollars for their work. Clearly ripped off by the producers of the movie. Since people are uneducated there, they really believed that the boy actor had been raped.

It is not acceptable for producers to pick up poor children, use them to make millions of dollars, and dump them back in the slum and poverty they were living in before. And paying only a few thousand dollars to a child when you've made millions off of them and their work is criminal.








Film, Rafiq Qureshi, Rubina Ali, Slumdog Millionaire, Entertainment News, Delhi slum, India slum, slumdog child star, Mumbai slum

1 comment:

Karen Camer Shea said...

I believe that the producers have arranged to pay her school fees all the way through school.

I doubt even getting what an American child would get for a movie would bring the family out of poverty permanently.

I think it is despicable for the press to make such an offer to a poor family. It would be easy to convince a parent that the child would be better off elsewhere.