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Jukeboxes on the Moon By Rafil Kroll-Zaidi
Stardom is martyrdom: India arrives in the American imagination
He represents in petto India in transition—the obsession it inspired in the press, the way monstrous hybridism of East and West. it served as an occasion for all manner of —Rudyard Kipling, Kim sociological commentary—in these there was something incredible. The kind of life I have chosen is ultimately not for Breaking stories of Slumdog’s latest plaudit personal gain. received or offense caused perpetually —Osama bin Laden supplanted one another. The two slum children cast in big roles became, as they gamboled amid diverse filth and were beaten TWO WINTERS AGO, making their way for insolence in their see-through hovels, through Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, two young subjects of paparazzi surveillance. Freida Pinto, Muslim men became famous. One was Jamal a previously undistinguished Indian fashion Malik, a fictional orphan in a movie. The other model who played the film’s love interest, tied was Ajmal Amir Kasab, said to be from a clan for No. 5 in Vanity Fair’s Most Beautiful Woman of butchers in small-town Pakistani Punjab. in the World rankings; Details, with less film- The former, in the closing scenes of the film, industry cachet but wielding the imprimatur of is weedy, gawky; lets his mouth hang open in disinterested gay good taste, put her at No. a pantomime of nervous exhilaration; is newly 4. The reigning No. 1, Angelina Jolie, let slip rich from winning a game show; kisses the that she and her consort were planning to girl and then dances with the rest of the cast. adopt a slumdog of their very own. Newsweek The latter, in the most widely seen photo, is discovered it had a genuine slumdog working in stout, steroidful; wears too-short cargo pants, its Delhi bureau and persuaded him to produce a knockoff versace T-shirt, two backpacks filled an op-ed. The Washington Post’s third annual with ammunition and snacks; carries a double- Eastertide Peeps diorama contest received banana-clipped AK-47 that blurs as it swings several Slumdog-themed submissions; slumdog through the depopulated space before him. On itself entered the language as an all-purpose May 6, 2010, he was sentenced to be hanged. attributive for any story of unlikely success or thing Indian. A “slumdog effect” was credited I FIRST SAW SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE about with optimism among independent filmmakers, twelve hours into November 2008’s languorous, with a craze for bhangra-based fitness classes meandrated attacks in Bombay, and the film’s and an increase in donations to international visual style fittingly evoked the city as it was at children’s charities. Republican National that moment and as it is always: an unseemly Committee chairman Michael Steele sent collocation of bodies, buildings, land, and sea. out “slum love” to “slumdog governor” Bobby On the whole the film was slight and slipshod, Jindal. Slumdog Millionaire was proclaimed its world-pop-scored hullabaloo admitting “the movie Generation O can call its own.” a complaisant charm. But its reception and The big O himself said it reminded him of his coverage, the quality and extent of the doting in Indonesian boyhood. the four months between its theatrical release Even in the late stages of its overexposure, and its apotheosis at the Academy Awards, and Slumdog continued to metastasize: its plot into well into the months beyond; the numbersome a Broadway musical; its monies, a scholarship awards it acquired, the churning regurgitant fund; its concluding dance number, a Pussycat
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Dolls cover. The film’s success, said the do it?), whose answer is revealed at the end Boston Globe, derived from its “multi-tasking (D. It is written). Throughout the film, this writ as romantic drama, exotic postcard, Eastern of destiny governs far beyond the game-show cultural study, pop-cultural riff, fractured triumph that is its jurisdiction. As vignettes of narrative exercise, and Bollywood boogie- operatic megapolitan pauperdom give way down sampler.” But Slumdog’s seductive power to a life of peripatetic high jinks, exuberant had little to do with chemistry-free romance or petit larceny, and agreeable if menial jobs, visual flamboyance, with “photogenic squalor” Jamal’s progress comes to feel oddly without or “polyglot verve”—and little ultimately to do impediment. Slumdog was often called a with the story the film told. Far more powerful fairy tale, which served as a defense of the was the story told about the film, and the film’s nonsensicality and occasionally as an consolations it offered, mostly by accident, acknowledgement of its plentiful folkloric motifs to a culture newly conscious of its waning (Predestined Treasure, Princess in the Tower, preeminence. That story had everything to do Quest for Stolen Princess, Princess Rescued with the coincidence of Jamal Malik’s and Ajmal from the Lower World), but never as an Kasab’s debuts. assessment of its actual fabulous coherence. For at the heart of Jamal’s destiny are neither JAMAL, A NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD PEON who the haywire contrivances that endow him works in a call center and is on the verge of with the necessary factoids nor the flaccid winning Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, is arc of his star-crossed love, but an innate interrogated by policemen who suspect him of aptitude, an assurance of success, an identity cheating. He relates, in flashbacks to childhood that precedes experience. His is an ancient (six-ish), adolescence (fourteen-ish), and the story, that of high birth and low upbringing, near past, how he came to know the answers; the prince raised as a pauper, the crownling these flashbacks tell the story of his life. He sent abroad for safekeeping, the boy who, on and his older brother, Salim, live in a Bombay reaching adolescence, manifests wondrous slum until they are orphaned by their mother’s abilities that betoken the patrimony to which he death. They meet a girl named Latika, and all will eventually accede (e.g., Theseus, Jesus, three are impressed into a begging syndicate. Harry Potter). Jamal’s birthright, his secret The brothers escape, but Latika doesn’t. After superpower, is simply this: He is not Indian. traveling around India for several years, they Our princely weanie’s arrival is signaled return to Bombay at the insistence of lovelorn by one of the film’s sporadic burps of lesser Jamal and rescue Latika from a brothel, but magic. After a brief montage of their wanderings fall out when Salim claims her for his own. Five outside Bombay, Jamal and Salim tumble from years later, Jamal is a tea-boy in a call center a moving train, roll down an embankment, and and Salim is muscle for the mob. They reunite, have doubled in age when they sit up; in front and Jamal again sleuths his way back to Latika, of them is the Taj Mahal; Jamal asks, “Is this whom Salim has delivered to his boss as a kept heaven?” Until this point, Jamal spoke only woman. She and Jamal try to run away together, Hindi, but now he commands perfect convent but Salim recaptures her. Jamal goes on the school English, acquired not after he and Salim game show so that Latika can locate him; Salim, reinvent themselves as Taj Mahal tourist guides in a change of heart, sacrifices himself to secure but, miraculously, before. Jamal’s English is not her freedom. Jamal successfully answers the a late-blooming native speaker’s facility; it is ninth and final question. actually a new mother tongue. Hindi he reserves At the beginning of Slumdog, the audience thereafter for lowly sorts (rickshaw drivers, a blind is presented with their own multiple-choice beggar from his syndicate days); English is the question (Jamal Malik is one question away language he turns to in amusement, shock, and from winning 20 million rupees. How did he anger, the language in which he professes (and,
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we might imagine, but for his boyish chastity, attend the ceremony with the rest of the cast. makes) love. On its own this transformation is not Their parents had been holding out for more the shibboleth of Jamal’s election (it occurs as money, but apparently they had relented. In well with Latika and Salim), but for him alone it Los Angeles, the two appeared alongside the resonates with other exceptional developments. seven (much wealthier) children and teenagers A few critics groped at Jamal’s incongruity, his who had played Jamal or Salim or Latika (as essential Westernness, and flailed to explain it. “youngest” or “middle” or “older”). The group “He’s got more affinities with his twentysomething went to Disneyland; they were photographed counterparts here and worldwide,” suggested with Mickey and rode on “it’s a small world.” one—of this (impecunious, Indian, Muslim) young When Rubina and Azharuddin made their man—“than any of them do with their elders.” wee-hours return to Bombay, the airport was thronged with well-wishers. “America was IN JANUARY OF LAST YEAR, just after Oscar amazing,” said Rubina. “I loved the pizza there. nominations, the British and American media People are so beautiful.” picked up on the story of Slumdog’s child With the pair returned to Garib Nagar, actors, poor children from the Bombay slums journalists reported that they had themselves who had been cast as poor children from the become a nuisance: “Reporters were Bombay slums. Three months into the release everywhere where any details of the children of the film that their street-kid cred had already and their families could be taken down. Some helped to bolster, Azharuddin Mohammed residents complained about the chaotic scenes Ismail (the youngest version of Salim) and as journalists ran from house to house, and the Rubina Ali (the youngest version of Latika) odd scuffle ensued.” Azharuddin, on refusing were still living in Garib Nagar (“Poor Man’s to meet with an interviewer who had paid his Colony”). It emerged that Azharuddin (by then father for access, was beaten, and the beating age ten) had been paid roughly three thousand was photographed. tears… boy after beating dollars for his acting work and Rubina (by then (UK Sun); azharuddin feels better with an age nine) around nine hundred. Azharuddin’s electronic gadget—azharuddin wears an old- father had already spent all of the money fashioned new england patriots t-shirt (New York on his tuberculosis. Authorities had recently Post). It was, “one stunned onlooker” told the demolished Azharuddin’s hutment, and he Sun, “like a scene out of Slumdog Millionaire.” and his family were to be found living under a After a week back in the slum, Rubina said, tarpaulin. The filmmakers said that they had “I want a proper bed and to live where the air established a trust fund for the children and that does not smell of poo.” Azharuddin, who had whatever (unspecified) remuneration the two fallen ill with a mystery slum fever, agreed: had received was a lot more than the average “There are too many mosquitoes and it is so slum wage. The children would get a lump sum hot. I just want to be in America now.” (unspecified; one newspaper reported fifty Both appeared as runway models at India thousand dollars) at age eighteen if they stayed Fashion Week. Rubina costarred in a lavish in school. The film’s distributors decried the Schweppes commercial in which she and Nicole “unwarranted press attention”; Danny Boyle, Kidman hasten through a red-sandstone palace the film’s director, and Christian Colson, of the in Rajasthan. (Rubina found Kidman “strange,” production company Celador (whose biggest and Us Weekly declared a Feud of the Week.) success before Slumdog was Who Wants to Be Rubina’s father said his daughter had been paid a Millionaire?), asked that “the media respect more for the ad than for Slumdog. He then tried the children’s privacy at this formative time in to sell her to rich Arabs. The News of the World, their lives.” in a sting deploying their “Fake Sheikh” team, A few days before the Oscars, the film studio concocted a barren Emirati couple who met announced that Azharuddin and Rubina would Rubina, her father, and his brother in a five-star
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hotel. With Rubina absented to another room in this context,” he said. “All the tension and to play with the “princess,” the uncle asked for pressure on the family is media-dominated.” a payout of twenty million rupees—some four The government said that the children could times the price originally floated (and the same not accept both the state-allotted apartments amount as Jamal’s winnings). “This is not an and those offered by the filmmakers. The ordinary child,” he said. “This is an Oscar child.” children’s parents said the former would be too (He offered non-Oscar children at a discount.) small and badly located. Garib Nagar caught The police arrested Rubina’s father but then fire, and both children had to flee. In July, cleared him for lack of evidence. There were Azharuddin moved with his mother, brother, doubts about the allegations. “If he wanted to be and sister-in law into a one-room apartment rich,” said a slum dweller speaking on condition paid for by Celador (his father stayed in the of anonymity, “keeping her would be better than slum and died two months later). Rubina earning a lump sum.” Rubina’s mother, who had published her autobiography. “Rubina brings filed a formal child-trafficking complaint against alive a world of wastelands and rat-infested her ex-husband, was photographed engaging shanty dwellings,” said the publisher of Rubina’s stepmother in public fisticuffs. The Slumgirl Dreaming: My Journey to the Stars. filmmakers hired a social worker for the girl. A sewer main broke and flooded Rubina’s WHEREAS ALL THIS URCHIN-VENERY shack. “Rubina was covered in feces,” reported transpired without objection, a few months one newspaper. “This is just typical,” Rubina earlier much facile hand-wringing had arisen said. Azharuddin’s shack was again bulldozed over the filmmakers’ propriety in depicting by the authorities. India’s poor. When Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood’s august standard-bearer, posted to “I was frightened,” said Azharuddin his blog a tame one-liner on the controversy Mohammed Ismail, who lost his pet kittens (“let it be known that a murky under belly in the chaos. “Where is my chicken?” he exists and thrives even in the most developed asked forlornly, picking through the shamble nations”), he was shanghaied by the press of broken wood and twisted metal sheeting in and pushed to the head of the column then search of the family hen. advancing on Slumdog Millionaire with the cry of “Poverty porn!” (Bachchan soon raised The police beat Azharuddin’s father, which the white flag, calling the movie—in which caused the boy to weep. “I wish Danny- he appears, via archival footage and stand- uncle would come,” he said. Rubina’s shack in doppelganger, as a blazon of Oriental was bulldozed, her father likewise beaten by authenticity, his eminence compelling policemen, and she too was reported to have young Jamal to plunge into a cesspit for an wept. “I’m feeling bad,” she told the AP. She fell autograph—a “fairy tale.”) ill from “exposure to the humid night” and was At the same time, Slumdog was cheered taken to hospital. The municipal government for showcasing the “New India” (or “India said the children’s families would be given Shining,” in the enduring slogan of the center- 180-square-foot apartments. The bulldozers right Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2004 election returned to Azharuddin’s shack but spared it campaign). India too had been hit in the global a third leveling because, his father said, the crash, but without America’s bubbles and authorities were now aware of his son’s fame. debts: Here was the free market tootling along Danny Boyle flew to Bombay and was at a healthy clip. “You get this extraordinary photographed hugging the children and capitalism, growing and building there,” said promising to arrange for their rehousing. “I Danny Boyle in an interview. “We’ve got a certainly hope this is the last time I have to problem at the moment in the West with speak to the media about Azhar and Rubina capitalism… because in order to operate at
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its best it needs to constantly expand, so it’s finesse, like his knowledge of British soap definitely got room to expand in India. They’ll operas, shows up his superiors. This phase in hit a wall at some point.” “Here,” said Slumdog Jamal’s fairy-tale maturation resembles a more screenwriter Simon Beaufoy about London, “we recently devised form: the Bildungsroman. couldn’t get an escalator on the Underground The Bildungsroman has lately monopolized fixed in six months, literally. And over there Americans’ exposure to the literary life of the they have built entire megacities in that time.” developing world, as much for the genre’s There were paeans to the Tata Nano, the new familiar rhythm as for the tendency of its new everyman’s car priced at one hundred thousand protagonists—in completing their formation rupees (two thousand dollars); to Bombay’s (Bildung) and, per generic convention, assuming spirit of entrepreneurship and its rising class of their proper place in modern, bourgeois society— “slumdog thousandaires.” to acclimate not to the restless-making culture of Such rhetoric represents only half the binary their birth but to the United States. Jamal never cliché of India since neoliberal reform. “Incredible emigrates; he carries the West within him. Amid !ndia” (the Ministry of Tourism has been using those who merely and for modest compensation this one since 2002) is, in the language of the pretend to be the compatriots of the foreigners film’s admirers, “a land of contrasts,” “a high-tech whose calls they answer, Jamal, neither born nor powerhouse with more beggars than cars,” a land bred, is the real deal. in which Boyle’s “extraordinary capitalism” meets That Jamal is a South Asian Muslim places “incredible poverty” and creates “an incredible his story within an especially populous subgenre metaphor for globalization.” Recollections of of postcolonial émigré Bildungsromane: those Slumdog were exaggerated in both directions, written after 9/11 and set in the Islamic world. E.g.: toward progress and poverty alike, the squalor of its early location shots contrasted with the Reading Lolita in Tehran Prisoner of Tehran sumptuous cityscapes that inspired some to Honeymoon in Tehran Persepolis My Name interpolate development exemplars not actually Is Iran Iran Awakening Persian Girls Daughter found in the film. The critic David Edelstein, in of Persia Funny in Farsi The Septembers of conversation with Boyle, chirruped about the Shiraz A Sky So Close The Other Side of the changes wrought upon Bombay by a dozen Sky Saffron Sky The Saffron Kitchen Salt and on-screen years: “crowded freeways” (there is Saffron Dawn Mirage Desert Caspian Rain one calamitous Indian traffic jam on a surface Infidel My Life as a Traitor Camelia: Save road) and “hip nightlife” (there is none; this Yourself by Telling the Truth Living in Hell characterization, like another critic’s description Jumping over Fire Burned Alive Behind the Tall of Salim’s “slick, nightclub world,” apparently Walls Behind the Burqa My Forbidden Face refers to a makeshift, clientless whorehouse in an Lipstick Jihad A Bed of Red Flowers Minaret empty McMansion). Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith Things I’ve The poverty-porn indictment supposed an Been Silent About Even After All This Time exploitive, lurid depiction of exotic privation and To See and See Again The Blindfold Horse hardship, but Slumdog, in the story of Jamal, Married to a Stranger Journey from the Land controverts these charges even as it shares pornography’s premise: the elision of difficulty Jamal learns the answers to the quiz-show and the fantasy of ease. questions by “living” them in the order they are asked, a serendipity that recalls the plotting of AT THE CALL CENTER where the adult Bildungsromane as described by Wilhelm Dilthey, Jamal (played by British actor Dev Patel) the genre’s first critic: “A regular development is winds up working, his every movement belies observed in the life of the individual: each of the his humdrum goferdom, class background, stages has its own intrinsic value and is at the and scant formal education. His technological same time the basis for a higher stage.”
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of No Inside the Kingdom Girls of Riyadh Bitter and bearing enhance, on varying levels, our Sweets Naphthalene: A Novel of Baghdad awareness of Jamal’s distinction, they commute Nadia’s Song The Story of Zaha The Cry of the his risk of masculinity. Dove West of the Jordan Salaam, Paris. “Jamal’s just a wet blanket,” said Beaufoy. “He just sits there.… He seemed dogged Women (and especially cosmopolitan Iranian without any personality, really. Which made women) whoppingly preponderate in the him look just slightly autistic or something authorship of these English-language “veil lifters,” in his quest for Latika.” The filmmakers which cater to curiosity about the misogynies attempted to correct for this late in production and sundry oppressions of Muslim societies. by adding scenes in which Jamal gets to erupt Jamal’s story heralds a subtiliation of this trend: in overwrought rage. But these do nothing to in that his congenital Westernness would redund attenuate his insipidity; nor does the romance actual geographic flight; in that his tale is not itself, an epicene, unconsummated side autobiographical memoir, which has impropriated plot in which Latika incessantly contrives to to itself the mantle of the Bildungsroman, but a be kidnapped and raped while remaining, return to the genre’s fictional third-person roots; evidently, pretty into the ineffectual Jamal all and in that he is not the jeune première of the the while. veil lifter nor the budding cadet of the classic Further evincing Jamal’s feebleness and his Bildungsroman but something in between—an situation within the post-9/11 Bildungsroman is emasculated man. his stance toward Islam: not the anathemas of a “I had been looking at all these guys in Hirsi Ali or the carefully modulated resentments Bollywood,” said Boyle of casting the lead. of Persia’s royalist disenfranchised, but, by and “There were some really good lads… but they large, apathy. The only scene in Slumdog that all had the wrong look… like they can rip their connects Jamal to Islam is the pogrom in which shirts off and get under the waterfall in the his mother is killed. This event—which should Swiss Alps… I wanted a guy who didn’t look be the seminal moment of his life—becomes like a potential hero. I didn’t want that body.” but one more answer to one more question. (Said one of the good lads: “When I gave my (“Trifles,” asDavid Copperfield has it, “make first audition, I was quite lean.… But when the sum of life.”) In the riot scene, Jamal and they called me four months later for the final Salim splash in a shallow concrete cistern while auditions, I had a beefed-up look.”) Azharuddin their mother and a dozen other launderers go and Rubina likewise were chosen with an about their Indically polychromatic business; the eye toward authentic unprepossession. (Said mother glances with portentous washerwoman producer Christian Colson of the decision not to unease toward trains rumbling past on nearby cast Anglophone children in those roles, “They’d tracks; the train traffic clears to reveal an look too middle-class”; added screenwriter onrushing Hindu mob (the white noise of their Simon Beaufoy, “Very well-fed… completely roar subtitled, “They’re Muslims, get them!”); wrong compared to these little ankle-biters who she is felled by a fanatic’s rebar; the brothers, just zip around the slums.”) But with Patel this fleeing amid further rout, happen upon a gesture was a nonstarter. His body language, young boy elaborately kitted out as a blue- his first-world sapling’s slouch, his stride so presumptuous of personal space and shitless At the Oscars, one hopeful journalist asked sidewalks, and his barely Indian accent all mark Boyle about the rumor, later confirmed, that him out from his castmates in high and gangly Patel was dating Freida Pinto—the object of relief. (The visual evidence of Jamal’s poverty is, Jamal’s noble and sexless desire—and pointed in the phrasing of Arundhati Roy—the only critic out that a bona fide romance between these two to identify his otherworldliness—nothing more newly christened People 100 Most Beautifuls than “an epic prop.”) Even as Patel’s physique “would be an amazing case of life imitating art.”
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skinned Hindu god who stares at them as he man, with worse lurking beyond the frame.) stands frozen in the posture of the relevant Jamal’s heroism, in short, is his gormlessness. iconography. The little blue boy (Joseph from “Agreeable enough if vague” was the Times’ a first-grade Nativity turning up on the picket description. As a putative Muslim, he is made line outside an abortion clinic just as someone courageous and principled by his very lack of shoots the gynecologist) provides Jamal a these qualities. crucial piece of knowledge about the god Ram Such attitudes follow “Jamal” even outside the (hindoo deities for $100). Having related this world of the film. Dev Patel “moved to tears” the anecdote to his interrogators, Jamal concludes, visiting evaluator of his tenth-grade drama exam with husky piety, “If it wasn’t for Ram and Allah, by performing an original monologue in which he I’d still have a mother.” channeled the bemused horror of a child caught In Q&A, the novel on which Slumdog is in the Beslan school hostage crisis. Tanay loosely based, the Jamal character, a doorstep Chheda, who plays “middle” Jamal, went on foundling taken in by a Scottish priest, is given from Slumdog to act in My Name Is Khan, a film the name Ram Mohammed Thomas—creed and starring Shahrukh Khan (one of few Bollywood sect unknown, he embodies India’s theme-park actors more bankable than Amitabh Bachchan). diversity. There is no Christian proxy in Jamal’s Chheda plays the young Khan/Khan, an autistic exasperation with the internecine grievances Muslim deemed suspicious and detained of two abstruse Asiatic religions, one of which by authorities at the San Francisco airport. nominally claims him. Boyle said that he sought Explained Khan, in the riot scene to assume “the point of view of a seven-year-old, who wouldn’t understand My Name Is Khan is also about Islam and the any of the finer details of politics, nationalism, way the world looks at Islam but we are not intolerance, bigotry… they cannot make sense of taking any sides. We are only trying to say that it”; this docile incomprehension Jamal will carry there are only good people and bad people. with him into adulthood. “Jamal’s life should There are no good Hindus, bad Hindus, good have been brutally coarsened by tragedy,” noted Christians, bad Christians. Either you are a the New York Times, but it wasn’t, whereas good person or a bad person. Religion is not for Salim, Boyle tells us, the mother’s death is the criterion, humanity is. The tagline we have “an event that really turns him to violence. He put in the film is:The first superhero with only decides never to suffer again but to make other one superpower—humanity. people suffer instead.” Jamal’s oblique indictment of the bad men Last August, as Khan was in transit through (Hindu nationalists and Muslim radicals) whose Newark Liberty International Airport, TSA cyclic barbarisms under banners of faith agents became suspicious and detained him have ultimately led to his orphancy is almost because his name was Khan. aggressively apolitical (the riot, said Colson, “Danny’s been very careful to—depoliticize”). JAMAL’S ALOOFNESS, his aura of mystical But if fascist Hindutva politics—the proximate circumscription, rendered unlikely the analogy cause of the mother’s death, with “Ram,” not wherein the two spunky slum children were said “Allah,” actually showing up—is hugely more to be duplicating his “rags-to-riches” trajectory. corrosive for India than is Islamic extremism, “The glamorous world of the Oscars stands the susurrations of Muslim ultras are what in sharp contrast to the squalid conditions in reverberate abroad. One stage beyond Mumbai’s slums,” said one report as the two progressive skepticism, Jamal’s faux truism set out for L.A., “but in their case life is truly is full of unspoken repudiation. (Salim, who beginning to imitate art.” Azharuddin and Rubina prays mornings for the forgiveness of his sins, would prosper like Jamal just as the “orphan seems meant as a soft example of a bad indie film” had prospered like Jamal.
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That this analogy grew ever messier was on the news as a massacre site. Yet,” following the children’s homecoming presented asserted GQ, “that only gave Jamal’s very no impediment to its invocation. Absent the secular defiance a new edge of triumph.” Let us grand, mistily prognosticated success that was return, then, to Victoria Terminus—a shooting to have equated with Jamal’s twenty-million- location twice over—and to the anti-Jamal, the rupee blowout, the commentary reverted to its complement to his physical weakness, political pre–Academy Awards tack: Azharuddin and insensibility, and inherent Westernness, the Rubina, restored to their former indigence, had other South Asian Muslim who rose to fame at simply returned to the meaner circumstances of the same time: Ajmal Amir Kasab. their characters—their native lot. To Jamal went Years from now, the magazine went on to the second half of the film’s tagline, Destined to say, “we won’t have forgotten the scads of win. The kids got Born to lose. anonymous dancers who show up to shake Danny Boyle, in a promotional video for their collective booty… behind Jamal and his Slumdog, said of India: honey in Slumdog’s euphoric train-platform finale. Just think of them as the Mumbai What we would regard as a terrible condition victims’ posthumous revenge on the gunmen.” of life, you know, they accept that, that that If terrorist sounds a note of pejoration while is their destiny. They always used to say that insurgent concedes certain autochthonous about a kind of spiritual thing, that proper rights, gunman, the American media’s epithet spirituality is infinite, and India’s a bit like that, of choice for the Bombay attackers (and for because there’s so many people changing, which usage the New York Times was called everything’s infinite, and we used to say it’s out and couldn’t explain itself), seemed tinged like the ocean, because it’s changing, totally, with near-approbationary awe. everything’s changing about it, and yet it’s All ten gunmen were superlatively competent. always there, and always the same. What we They remained sharp; the police assumed they tried to do in the film, interestingly, we tried must have taken amphetamines, cocaine, LSD to use it as [an] optimistic thing that actually to stay awake. (Autopsies showed they had not.) change can happen because of it as well. The police seemed almost vaudevillian in their You can use it as an idea where, and, and uselessness. Some of them were armed with I think that’s where it’s a hybrid between muskets, others had no ammunition. Those who the philosophies there and a kind of more were armed couldn’t shoot to save their lives. Western application, an idea, a romantic idea One cop tried throwing a plastic stackie chair at which is that you can change your destiny. Kasab and his partner, Ismail Khan. All teams save Kasab’s (which attacked Victoria Terminus What Hegel (in referring to Africans) called “the and a hospital) made for locations where enormous energy of sensuous arbitrariness foreigners and wealthy Indians congregate (a which dominates their lives” applies to the backpackers’ café, a Chabad Lubavich center, children but not to Jamal. What Hegel (in two five-star hotels). “If you speak to the media,” referring to the Bildungsroman) said of the young one of the gunmen was advised, via cell phone, Bildungsheld fits Jamal better: “However much by his handler, “tell them this is only the trailer. he may have quarreled with the world or been The film is yet to come.” pushed around in it, in the end he usually gets Kasab was perfectly cast. At VT, he and Khan his girl and some sort of position, marries, and racked up fifty-eight kills (a third of the final toll) becomes a Philistine like everybody else.” in what was by far the most efficient phase of the three-day-long operation. Kasab had no LATE IN NOVEMBER OF 2008, “the same handler; he “strolled.” “They were like angels legendary rail terminal that’s the setting for of death,” said a newspaper photographer who the movie’s joyously Bollywoodized finale… shadowed Kasab and Khan through the station
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and whose photo of Kasab—clean-cut in back- ambushed the visiting Sri Lankan cricket to-school clothes, one-handing his AK-47—was team. The Taliban mounted commando universally disseminated. “When they hit seizures, of the Lahore Police Academy someone they didn’t even look back. They were and the Pakistani army’s headquarters in so sure.” The pair inexplicably passed over Rawalpindi, that recalled the tactics seen in some of those caught in the station, doing them Bombay: laying “siege” by inviting one’s own no harm. They went on to storm an obstetric besiegement. “Their mission seems to be hit and children’s hospital, outside of which they and run,” said an army spokesman. “Or hit shot the state’s top anti-terror cop; they stole and get hit.” The Taliban had won concessions his SUV, shot at people outside a cinema, stole for self-governance and sharia law and were a sedan, ran into a roadblock, and then Khan within sixty miles of Islamabad. These guys was killed and Kasab pretended to surrender again? Pakistan, it seemed, sure could use but then shot another cop before he was “a compelling story of how wounded people overpowered and arrested. and wounded societies seek redemption and Kasab was captured on 26/11 itself, and renewal. President Bush and I,” said Laura, by 30/11 he had become “the lone surviving “really loved The Kite Runner very much.” gunman.” One of his first interrogators spoke Slumdog’s India, meanwhile, for all its of a “muscular, well-trained body” and a face celebrated modernity, sustains but one figure of that was “very calm but has a blank, cold stare economic development apart from Jamal’s call all the time.” The police asked him who he center: the construction industry (building as was supposed to kill. “People.” Where was he Bildung). The reunion of Jamal and Salim takes supposed to go after completing the operation? place in a half-built skyscraper bristling with “We were supposed to die.” rebar and the future, one of many being put He had no surname, so the criminal-justice up by Salim’s boss. “India is at the hub of the bureaucracy used his family’s caste, Kasai— world now, brother,” says Salim. “And I am at butchers (If you have never seen a tiger, look the center of the center. See that down there? at a cat. If you have never seen a Thug, look at That used to be our slum!” It bears mentioning a Kasai). Some said he spoke fluent English. that the slum where the brothers grow up is the He had extensive Koranic instruction, or knew object of real-life developers’ most exquisite nothing of the Koran. His age was unclear. His plutonic desire. The comprehensive execution vagueness construed his villainy. of such plans, which would involve an historic transfer of urban land and an equally vast NATIONAL ALLEGORY has always been dispossession, is a fait accompli where the film proposed or courted by the Bildungsroman, is concerned. and postcolonial Bildungsromane have been In 2007, Mukesh Ambani—the energy especially prone to interpretation as parables of tycoon who later said “a fear-psychosis is (and evidence for) a sort of civilizational coming being created to slow projects of national of age. India, as Jamal, invited contemporary importance” when forty thousand protesters fixations as much for what it is as for what it is not. forced the return of expropriated farmland on It is not, for one thing, Pakistan, that unruly which the Tata Nano factory was to have been adolescent for whom Jamal’s story offered a built—was named Forbes’s richest man in model of bourgeois normality. Slumdog’s run the world: the first Indian thus distinguished. commenced with 26/11 and continued through Shortly afterward, he set up a new company to what was widely presented as Pakistan’s fund the films of Steven Spielberg and started deterioration and near collapse as it ceded building for himself, his mother, his wife, and political and territorial integrity to various his three children a two-billion-dollar, sixty- bad men. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant outfit story house on land that had been set aside on which India blamed the Bombay attacks, for a Muslim orphanage.
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FOR A LONG TIME, there were no new brothers and sisters will be able to get married. photos of Kasab. Then he was pictured sitting Look at how well these other people live [lit. in a police station on a plastic stackie chair, “eat”].’” Reporters tracked down Kasab’s his wrists in handcuffs and bandages. He father and asked him whether it was true that looked bored. His T-shirt now said sports. Late he’d handed Kasab over to L-e-T for money. He last February, the police filed against him a denied it. “I don’t sell my sons.” chargesheet that ran to eleven thousand pages. In July, Kasab stood up in court, abruptly He was indicted for belligeration, for murder pleaded guilty, and made an elaborate actual and attempted, for entering the train confession; “Hang me if you want to,” he said. station without a ticket; connected to physical But he disputed a few of the charges, so the evidence that included leftover grenades, judge resumed proceedings. During the trial, scraps of paper reading this is a pointer to war, Kasab’s requests were numerous. He wanted and a large bottle of Mountain Dew. Hundreds meat (the jail’s kitchen was vegetarian). He of witnesses testified against him. He killed wanted proper biryani. He wanted long-grained my sir.… This short man shot at my boss; How basmati rice. He wanted to order a book of short can I forget?; He is the one. She was my only stories. He complained of his boredom. “He daughter. He was carrying a bag. She died in was a young man without much purpose in life,” front of my eyes. That shorty! said Hillary Clinton. “He was susceptible to the In the months following his apprehension blandishments of the terrorist organizations.” and during the trial, Kasab remained opaque “This,” she noted, “is not someone who had but became much more pedestrian. In court some deep, overriding ideological commitment.” he smiled, laughed, and cried; in which acts Kasab supposedly told the police immediately he was called “baby-faced,” “childlike,” “college after his capture, “If you give me regular meals student”–like, “fresh-faced,” “very good-looking,” and money, I will do the same for you that I did “sullen,” “curious”; a patsy, a monster, an expert for them.” in the production of crocodile tears. His lawyer, In his indifferent allegiance, his meager Abbas Kazmi, claimed the accused was a minor, parroted boilerplate on Islam, his apoliticality, but Kasab himself slipped up and told the court his nebulous personality, and his entrapment by he was twenty-one. (“The cat,” said Kazmi, “has designs that he could not but execute, Kasab now come out of the bag.”) Still, serologic and is familiar—but with an important variation. radiologic testing was carried out to establish For Jamal, predestination means that he is Kasab’s majority. (His clavicle had fused; he bought off from birth, guided by a mysterious could be tried as an adult.) beneficent hand. For Kasab, said Clinton, Kasab had left school at age twelve. He “We have to make sure people do get a good worked as a laborer. At some point he may education. We have to make sure that people have had a falling out with his father, who had refused to buy him new clothes for the festival In 2002, a captured seventeen-year-old L-e-T of Eid. He possibly became involved in petty militant who had killed twenty-eight civilians banditry and with a friend sought out Lashkar- explained his motivations for joining the group: e-Taiba in order to acquire better weapons and “Muslims were being butchered in Kashmir… thereby improve their brigandage. In another their homes were destroyed and their women version of the story (A Kasai never tells the were being raped. It made me very angry. On truth; if he did he would not be a Kasai), Kasab top of it all, it was very hot, and the thought of said his father encouraged him to seek out the doing something adventurous in the mountains group: “He said, ‘Look, son, we’re very poor. was very attractive.” “Our bodies would emanate Other people live the good life, and so can scent, and we would go to paradise,” said Kasab you. You won’t have to do anything difficult. of his own motivations. “Our faces would glow We’ll have money, we’ll no longer be poor. Your like the moon.”
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do have jobs. I mean, those are all part of what its curiously self-negating quality: Jamal doesn’t we see as… a more positive alternative to what do anything to get the money. His is a victory the terrorists are selling.” Kasab, too, could without competition. His success derives either have been bought. His is the ghost Bildung. from coincidence or from fate’s design, and destiny, in this sense, is outside the purview of SLUMDOG HAS JAMAL GROWING UP as accomplishment. As an American, his success India grows out of its bucolic Nehruvian socialism, is earned simply by being; as an Indian, luck is and the film’s miscitation as “Bollywood” in the most he can be allowed. turn became a bellwether: “Hindi cinema,” in Even as the deliverance of Azharuddin and a characteristic proclamation, “stands poised Rubina seemed finally at hand (roles in an to finally make the international crossover.” Anthony Hopkins film), their destiny continued But any as-yet-unpawned jewel of the West’s to snag. Bulldozers once more threatened dematerialized economy was too dear to lend Rubina’s hutment, and her father bickered with out for long. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the Jai Ho Trust over the promised apartment. of Slumdog’s Oscar wins, “I think we should be “I am confused,” she told reporters. “Pray very proud. Britain is showing it has the talent to for us.” But the children’s foremost problem lead the world.” In Hollywood itself the reception was that they had become too famous, was one of magisterial biplicity. The film, a big missing school often enough that they were studio’s indie division’s success, was welcomed threatened with the loss of their $120-a-month as an exotic foreign confection risen against stipends and the lump sums contingent on the incredible odds, and which could be validated completion of their secondary education; they (could achieve its destiny) solely through its were traveling too often, said their trustees, investiture by the Academy of Motion Picture and neglecting their studies for junkets and Arts and Sciences, a brotherhood to which it had ceremonies while their families asked for cars always rightfully, secretly, belonged. The film was, and spending money. “He is tired, really tired,” inspiringly, theirs; but it was really ours all along— said Boyle’s representative. “The demands bought and paid for. This narrative devolved are now skyrocketing. Danny is tired, Danny is to the film’s notable brown contributors: A. R. frustrated at these demands and has left India Rahman, already an internationally esteemed for England.” composer, now got to sit next to the First Lady Through this film’s impossibly long arc, the at the banquet for Time’s 100 Most Influential only genuine charity went to saving those who People in the World and to score the new Vince needed no saving to begin with, civilizing those Vaughn movie; Anil Kapoor, already a Bollywood hitherto fine specimens of our civilization. star, now got to throw out the first pitch at a Beaufoy, in talking about his travels to Bombay, Dodgers game and to portray, on the new season offered a brilliant choice of verb: “That… colonial of 24, an embattled Iranian-ish premier who tries past that twenty years ago was still very present, to make peace with the United States but in so really, had been erased totally and replaced by doing ignites the assassinatory passions of his this amazing kind of fast-forward capitalism.” country’s bad men. From halcyon empire to mission cinématrice: In these persons, it would seem, we had Take up the Poor Man’s burden. a cohort of Jamals: satellites in the orbit (or firmament) of our culture, in whose victories we PERHAPS THE FILM had been destined could share. Jamal’s own victory adumbrates the for something. Slumdog coincided with fading belief in American native birth as the ideal yet another, bigger story about a boy with outcome in a global lottery, and it is notable for an absent father and a repudiated Muslim patrimony: Jamal Malik was “a romantic young This has for years been predicted by American man who… cares nothing for money,” said critics who don’t watch Bollywood films. one newspaper, and “we saw these laudable
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qualities in the hundreds of thousands of shown to be a real false idol.’” “People in early people (most of them young) who toiled to screenings wanted to know, Did he get the elect” this other underdog, who more than a money? Well, he got the girl.” “Have they got few thought to call our “slumdog president.” no soul?” Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was restored to prime time in America. Regis Philbin would What a relief that it might be not about the resume hosting. “In these hard economic money, at least for Jamal and for his people. For times, more than ever,” he said, “it’s important. Americans, of course, the absence of money Somebody’s big payoff could end up being the as the presence of virtue is a bit of a hard sell. retirement plan they’re not going to get from a Better if the hero chooses virtue over money and 401(k) that has crashed.” Regis ex machina. for his virtue is rewarded with—money. Of course it was always about the money. It MANY NOTED that the romantic young man was about the money even as the four gunmen cared nothing for money: in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel went about their business, one of them wearing a long-sleeved “There’s something much more interesting, of graphic tee, another looking like a young course, that steps outside the show, in a way, Charlie Sheen in a rakishly swiveled baseball is that he is not interested in the money, really. cap (which read i love jesus), all of them looking Which is strange. His reason for being on the for all the world like those youths who, it is said, show is very different.” “His goal isn’t money, have more in common with one another than it’s to raise his profile in hopes of finding with their elders. the girl he lost.” “She’s the only thing of real value he sees in the swirl of riches and rags handler: Get a couple of floors burning. around him.” “I wanted to make it about more gunman: OK. than money.” “The love story, which is much … stronger than a television show, much deeper handler: Have you started the fire yet? and more profound and more recognizable gunman: No, we haven’t. [Giggles.] and more lovable and more timeless than a … game show.” “I didn’t want to make it a story handler: Nothing’s going to happen until you about a slum dweller who drives off with a start the fire.… Rolex watch on his wrist in a Bentley at the gunman: Huh? end.” “’Cause I don’t think getting rich… handler: Throw some grenades, my brother. is necessarily a great way to end a film.” There’s no harm in throwing a few grenades. “Someone who finally finds the love of their life after finding her and losing her and finding At one point in Slumdog, just after the Taj Mahal her again, that’s something I will applaud.” bits, “middle” Jamal leads a plump American ♫“Just a humble slumdog / Sittin’ in the chair, couple on a tour of a crowded clotheswashers’ of a millionaire. / What will I be holding in the riverbank while Salim and his crew of suburchins end? / What’s my final answer? / Is it written jack the tires from the couple’s hired Mercedes. there, do I really care? / I’m only here so I can When the tourists return, their driver assumes phone a friend. / And if I thought I could find Jamal’s involvement and proceeds to thrash him. equivalence / I would swim a sea of human Husband intervenes. “You wanted to see the real excrement!”♫ “Salim is in a bath of money at India?” cries Jamal. “Here’s the real India!” “Well, the end, so the only one who gets rich in this son,” says solicitous wife, waving to husband for film ends up dead.” “And that’s struck a chord his wallet, “Here’s a taste of the real America!” with people, I think, right now, in an era where A crisp Benjamin. “This gets a huge laugh when we’ve suddenly turned around and gone, you play it in America!” said Boyle. “They love it ‘Wait a minute; this money thing, it’s been when the wallet comes out. They love all that.”
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… predilection for apocryphal platitudes (Plato handler: You haven’t even thrown a grenade on kindness, Einstein on miracles) yet true yet.… How hard can it be to throw a to his talents as an unwitting oracle—would grenade? Just pull the pin and throw it. have offered a neat irony in the poem’s … admonishment of American hubris. But the gunman: There are computers here with phrase proved impressively obscure, from twenty-two-inch, thirty-inch screens! lyrics written by Auden for Man of La Mancha handler: Haven’t you set fire to them? but never used in the production. Sings the … costumed figure of Death, gunman: This room is amazing. The windows are huge.… It’s got a double kitchen, double Ladies and gentlemen, you have made most bath, and a little bazaar. remarkable Progress, and progress, I agree, is a boon; Likewise Rubina’s visit to the hotel where her You have built more automobiles than are father tried to sell her: “My house,” she said, parkable, “is as big as the toilet you have here.” Her Crashed the sound-barrier, and may very soon experiences eventually changed her habits: Be setting up juke-boxes on the Moon: “[Rubina] now pays for a clean lavatory rather But I beg to remind you that, despite all that, than relieve herself by the railway tracks.” I, Death, still am and will always be Cosmocrat. Would that they had no desire for money; would that they just wanted money. Salim as There is a holy dread of those for whom it’s foil or villain is our bad guy, neutralized like truly not about the money. Those who know Jamal, with the bed of not-his-money he builds that death is no commodity, who do not count as his funeral bier, with his English so seemly their lives cheap. Those princes among the and agreeable even unto his dying words, bought-off, for whom there is no boredom, no “God is great”—not Allahu Akbar, which they seduction by honeyed zealotry or backsliding know now even in Sandusky. When Jamal is of the sort seen in Slumdog’s slumkids, but reunited with Latika, she whispers, “I thought instead a willful reverse trajectory: millionaire to we would meet again only in death,” but she slumdog. Those who would give up a quarter- fails to aspirate the final consonant, and it’s billion-dollar construction fortune to live in a easily misheard as “debt.” cave near the Khyber Pass. At the post-Oscars press junket, that orgastic culmination of not-about-the-money, Danny Boyle THE WESTERN MEDIA’S INTEREST in Ajmal described the atmosphere of “unlikely” triumph: Kasab waned long before the trial began; his romance had faded. In India, though, the There’s this amazing poet, British poet, called coverage remained intense. “Kasab seems W. H. Auden, and he wrote this amazing poem, as interested in the journalists as they are in and he talks, he says, about Americans putting him.” He goofed off in court. “Prosecutor Ujjwal jukebox—he says, “Soon you’ll be putting”— Nikam turned to him and said: ‘Don’t laugh. and it was to do with when America was trying Be serious. Otherwise I will call Dara Singh,’ a to travel to the moon. It’s really interesting, reference to the legendary Indian wrestler often because of course India’s now going to the invoked by parents to keep their children quiet. moon, this is the plan. And he talks in this Kasab laughed even more.” “Nikam condemned poem about putting jukeboxes on the moon. Kasab’s behaviour saying he was throwing “Soon you’ll be putting jukeboxes on the moon.” tantrums every now and then.” “Kasab’s behaviour was brought to the notice of the court I assumed the line to be from Auden’s “Moon after he refused to eat food on Wednesday and Landing,” which—in a departure from Boyle’s banged the utensil against the wall.” He offered
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to sketch L-e-T leaders whose likenesses were last year that “one from the extended family unknown to authorities, but officials found visualizes a situation of getting me to prisoned the drawings useless: “When he gave us the youngster—would that be too polite to address sketches we did not know what to say. He had him thus, better stick to propriety, alright, alleged drawn doodles like a small child.” The judge terrorist.… And I wonder today, if that were to scolded him endlessly. “Keep away this casual happen, what really would I engage him in…” attitude and show some seriousness.” “It is not But the press, once again, distorted everything proper to misbehave in jail.” “Why did you throw you said and shouted you down. away your plate of food?” “Are you crying? What I say go, Big B. Go to him now, as he goes to is the matter?” the death halfheartedly sought out, the destiny As the prosecution’s case wound down, only delayed by the court’s formalities. Maybe Kasab became quieter, and for much of his time they’ll grant him a last request. He can’t take it in the dock he slept, awaiting his conviction. (In with him. one Bangladeshi newspaper’s imperfect English, Go, Amitabh-ji. Buy him off. Buy him off when he had become the “lonely gunman.”) He perked there’s nothing left to purchase. This boy who up when it came time for his final statement, in would have been rich, who went abroad to seek which he denied having been present at any of his fortune and to die. He who would be brother the attacks and said the police had detained but for the Radcliffe Line. You, who were born him in Bombay days before, had shot him in to the united India in whose eye he was not the hand, “just like in the movies,” as part of the yet a gleam. You, prince who has retaken his frame-up. What had he been doing in the city, kingdom. You, king, born subject—to all those the judge wanted to know. Kasab’s answer can straight-backed stiff-lipped Boyles and Beaufoys. be interpreted two ways: He had come either to You, born in Allahabad, God’s city. Your Sikh watch some films or to break into Bollywood. mother from what is now Pakistan. You who Throughout it all, he kept on asking for things were, once, called the Angry Young Man. You he could not have. “I am bored and need books who were the Muslim coolie Iqbal Khan: When to read,” he told the judge. Countered the someone dared pull a gun in your train station, prosecutor, “Now, what is the use of reading you sent a falcon to seize the weapon and fly books?” “I need a few things urgently,” wrote it to you; when you saw that penniless old man Kasab to his lawyer. “These are Urdu Times boarding the Akbari for hajj, you gave your own newspaper, a perfume bottle and a toothpaste. lunch to him. You who as Anthony Gonsalves, Also please seek court’s direction to police the doorstep foundling raised by a Catholic asking them to deposit the amount, seized from priest, warned about “the hemoglobin in the my possession, in my jail account.” But the atmosphere.” You who as the Hindu police seized monies were the property of the court, commissioner Dev Pratap Singh got a repentant and so Kasab could not order the one-kilogram terrorist to turn informant. (You, who on the set cake that it was his right to request from the of Dev frightened the hell out of me.) You who prison bakery for his twenty-second birthday. as the Muslim poet Anwar Ali Anwar threw the He didn’t get anything he wanted, but he goddamn Portuguese out of Goa. asked nevertheless. He wanted to walk on You, the answer to question number one, for the verandah outside his cell. He wanted, on one thousand rupees. You, for whose autograph the Hindu holiday of Raksha Bandhan, when Jamal Malik swam a sea of human excrement. sisters tie bracelets around their brothers’ Go now to the countryman who should have wrists, for someone to tie a rakhi on his own. been. One more underpaid child actor cast in He wanted to meet Amitabh Bachchan. a production that succeeded beyond anything he could have guessed. Who will receive no I THINK you should do it, Big B. You were at reward in this world or the next. This boy who least considering it when you wrote on your blog had until then left so little trace on this world
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that his age had to be ascertained from his blood and his bones. It is all that remains to be done here. You know it is your destiny. After all, was not your flagging career revived, were not your troubled finances resolved, when Celador came to India and picked you as the host for its new franchise of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
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