(Look at that beauty mark, she’s a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe.)
The actual slumdogs from Slumdog Millionaire, for whom the director and producer bought houses and set up a trust, have been missing so much class lately that they’ve been threatened with getting their trust cut off. I for one am so sick of trust-fund punks thinking they don’t have to play by the rules.
Azharuddin Ismail, 11 and Rubina Ali, 10 have been told to stop skipping class in Mumbai or forfeit a 120-dollars per month payment.
Noshir Dadrawala, who helps administer the fund, said that Azharuddin was showing up at school only 37 percent of the time and that Rubina had a 27 percent attendance rate. The trust decided that the children must raise their attendance above 70 percent or forfeit their monthly stipends.
When asked about his truancy by NDTV, Ismail, 11, said “My father died and I had to go through the rituals so I couldn’t attend.” Ismail’s father died in September after a lengthy battle with tuberculosis. Ali, 10, gave a similar excuse, telling the network “I had hurt my foot with a glass shard and got burnt with a cracker. So I was not going to school.”
Ali’s father Rafiq defended her, saying “I know what is best for Rubina. They called us and said they will stop helping us. I told them God will take care of us.” [AP, NYTimes]
Small correction: “I burnt myself on a cracker” is actually NOT a similar excuse to “my father died.” That sh-t don’t even fly at community college. Though perhaps by “burnt with a cracker” she was speaking metaphorically, of her encounter with the rich white man who changed her life forever, and not necessarily for the better. And that maybe things were better before, when they were simpler, before her dance* with the fickle mistress that is fame. Discuss.
*elaborately choreographed with 50 extras and excessive shoulder gyrating.
(I just thought Professor Fuzzkins and the duckling duo were less depressing than the original picture)
The father of Slumdog Millionaire star Azharrudin Mohammed (who played Salim), the same one who slapped his son around for being impolite to photographers, has died in Mumbai. He got the finest care possible, but succumbed to a rare, incurable diseas– wait, hold on, I’m getting some new info… Sorry, check that, he died of tuberculosis. Which is still India’s number three killer, behind the bubonic plague and Ox palsy.
Mohammed Ismail’s premature death will inevitably fuel the controversy surrounding the fate of the slum children who appeared in the movie. He died today in the new flat bought for the family by the trust set up by director Danny Boyle.
Ismail had been ill for some time and had twice been admitted to a tuberculosis hospital in Mumbai after being turned away by another hospital in the city, which refused to admit him in case he infected other patients.
Well sure. I asked my friend who’s a doctor what the best way to cure someone with tuberculosis is, and he said, first you cover them with a plastic tarp, then you kick them into a vat of acid, and then you throw away anything they might have touched. Then you rub two sticks together and make a fire, because witches hate fire.
(Yo, dawg, we heard you like walls so we put walls in your house)
India treats their national treasures so well that Slumdog Millionaire actor Azharrudin Ismail recently moved into an apartment foreigners had to buy him just months after the Indian government knocked his house down and kicked him into an open sewer like a piece of garbage. Director Danny Boyle and producer Christian Colson are still in India securing a place for Ismail’s co-star, Rubina Ali. Meanwhile Ismail and his mom moved into their $50,000, one-room apartment. Pff, for that kind of money, you can get a mansion in Detroit with a fence made of corpses.
“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.”
Really? He actually put on a Hindi song and danced around? Now what the hell am I supposed to make a joke about? Wait, could he also call him “Mr. Danny?”
Azhar’s mother Shameem Ismail said she is looking forward to their first night in the new apartment.” God has given me so much,” she said. “We will sleep very well tonight. There is no water leaking, no bad environment, no quarreling.”
She and Azhar will share the main room, while Azhar’s brother Irfan Ismail Sheikh, 22, and his wife will sleep on a mattress in the kitchen, she said. Meanwhile, back in Garib Nagar, Azhar’s father, Mohammed Ismail, sat disconsolately on the hard wooden bed crawling with flies that the family used to share. He will remain here, and visit his son and wife in the new apartment regularly, he said. He said he’s hoping to get some government land in exchange for the shanty, and prefers to remain near the neighbors, chickens and mucky lanes he has always called home.
Azhar’s mother said she doesn’t want her husband in the new house because he does drugs, but she pledged to return to Garib Nagar for visits. [HuffPo]
At which point Azhar’s father took a huge bong rip and grumbled, “Yeah? Well at least the flies put out.”
Jesus, it’s about time. A week after his shanty got demolished and three months after both the filmmakers and an Indian housing authority promised him a house, Slumdog actor Azharudin Ismail finally has a new home.
Director Danny Boyle and producer Christian Colson flew into Mumbai. Smiling and hugging the children, Boyle said a home had been bought for Ismail, 9, who played the character of Salim as a child. He added they would soon buy one for Ali as well, who plays the young Latika.
The “Jai Ho” trust, named after the film’s award-winning track, and set up by Boyle and Colson, is meant to pay for the education and basic living costs of Ismail and Ali until they turn 18. A director for the trust said the apartment for Ismail was “comfortable, in a good neighborhood (and) near his school” and cost “upwards of 2 million rupees” ($42,000).
Boyle, who came under fire for not doing enough for the children who lived in squalor despite the film’s success, blamed the media for raising the families’ expectations. “Inevitably, the tension and pressure is media generated,” he said, after greeting Ali and Ismail with a hug. “They were given access to a world, an extraordinary and glamorous world, and they understandably want their lives to be completely transformed,” Boyle said. “The homes are a concern. That is one of the reasons why we built the trust.” [THR]
Boyle’s got a point. These kids didn’t have huge parts in the movie. You pay people for their work - just because your movie does well doesn’t mean you have to go back and pay your extras’ mortgages. Really it’s India that’s the problem. You can’t claim the kids as national heroes and then knock their house down and then demand that the west give you more money.. Even in North Korea they give you a shiny uniform.
The thing about photojournalism is that you can tell something bad has happened when you see a picture of a child’s toy covered in rubble. In fact, I think Toys Covered in Rubble is a freshman seminar at J-School. Anyway, the catastrophe in question was the demolition of Slumdog Millionaire star Rubina Ali’s home. You may recall the same thing happened to her co-star less than a week ago.
Dozens of police with bamboo batons walked around the alley where Rubina Ali’s house is located and supervised demolition crews of young men wielding sledgehammers and metal rods who tore down the shanty homes, a week after bulldozers demolished the home of Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, another child star of the same film, in a similar cleanup drive in a different part of the same slum. [via this delightful slideshow]
I figured that a few months ago, when the Indian government and the filmmakers both said they were going to buy the kids new houses, that they were probably full of sh*t. Empty promises are kind of what they do. Fine. But you’d think someone over there might whisper, “Psst: Hey. It’s gonna look really bad if we knock this bitch’s house down and make her mom breastfeed in the street.” But no. Progress waits for no one! Way to go, India! Now people can finally enjoy the majesty of that sh*t-covered alley without those ugly shanties all over it.
