Art & Entertainment

Grub Street Exclusives

Slumdog kids fall prey to tabloid hacks

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Grub Street Exclusives
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Scene One: Rubina Ali, 9, the child star of Slumdog Millionaire, is treated to food and gifts at a five-star hotel in Mumbai, and comes home blissfully unaware of the sting her hosts have conducted on her father.

Scene Two: As the sting surfaces on every TV channel and newspaper across India, her biological mother and stepmother exchange blows over the revelations, with Rubina watching, aghast.

Scene Three: Rubina is wedged between a burly cop and her dad, in an autorickshaw, and taken to a police station, for questioning. She returns to a queue of cameras lined up for reactions.

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Slumdog Millionaire

The British gutter press is leading the way in making it so, its chequebooks paying for lurid ‘exposes’ centred on two of the film’s child stars, Rubina and Azharuddin of Garib Nagar in Bandra. Middle-class Indian children who also starred in Slumdog are not part of this circus, clearly because they can’t be written up as rags-to-riches-to-rags stories. But Rubina and Azhar can, and how!

News of the World’s sting on Rubina’s father stinks, firstly, for the context in which it was done: Mazher Mahmood, celebrity British undercover reporter aka the "fake sheikh", flies into Mumbai from London, checks into a £480-a-night five-star suite, and invites a dirt-poor father over to offer a price for his daughter. Entrapping greedy and gullible Rafiq is as easy as taking candy from a child—hardly worth the big man’s expertise, honed by stings on indiscreet British royals and cocaine-snorting rockstars. But his daughter Rubina’s status as an object of voyeuristic western interest makes him fair game.

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There is, of course, lots of pious drivel about a "concerned close family friend" (read cheque-seeking informant), tipping off the tabloid about Rafiq’s hunt for a rich adoptive family for Rubina; of how it stepped in to address her exploitation (no other, more child-sensitive way of doing that?), and how it never let Rubina overhear any discussions on the plans to sell her (she heard them, didn’t she, when all hell broke loose later?)

The tone of the "world exclusive" underscores just how fake the piety is. Rubina ("angel-faced darling of the Oscars") is described as a giggling, awestruck creature ("my house is as big as the toilet you have here"), "shrieking with delight" over gifts. Her family’s non-adherence to western mores is described in almost mocking detail, and the luxury-poverty contrast driven home with a sledgehammer: "He arrived late with his little daughter at the luxurious Leela Kempinski hotel at 11.35 pm, when most children her age would be in bed.... Stepmum Munni, in a white sari, sat with her feet up in a chair until her husband told her to sit properly.... Then they raced to the buffet, piling up their plates high with food—a change from their usual diet of cheap rice and lentils.... After several main courses, the party descended on the desserts, washing it all down with glasses of mango juice—each one costing more than what Rafiq earns in a day."

It’s not just the News of the World. SlumdogDaily Mail, which has just carried a photofeature of the "spectacular catfight" between Rubina’s mother and stepmother. The Sun went to town on "Scumdad" Ismail slapping Azhar after his return from LA; its reporter posed with rotting garbage and described falling into shit for a story on Azhar’s "return to reality". Even the western broadsheets have revelled in forensic detailing, though less crudely, of life in a one-room shack with "bubblegum pink" walls (Rubina’s), near an open sewer.

Indian TV and page three, not to mention the fashion ramps, are also having their day with the Slumdog kids. But given that the Indian media doesn’t have more than the odd minute or para to waste on a child raped in a slum, it’s hard to accuse it of quite the same brand of voyeurism. Its gosh-golly reports from Garib Nagar seem largely driven by western media interest in the Slumdog kids; interest that claims to be about their welfare but has mostly to do with their saleability. The Brit tabloids have set the tone for how these hapless kids are to be projected: a contextless tone in which behaviour linked to grinding poverty is described with as much lascivious glee as a Yorkshire housewife’s romp with her milkman. Disquietingly, their reports, accompanied by pictures and video clips of fights and slaps, are showing up on celebrity sites, TV channels and newspapers from America to Arabia to Australia.

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The question is: Is any one objecting? The filmmakers, driven perhaps by guilt at the media monster unleashed by the casting of "real" slum-dwellers in a blockbuster, seem to be voicing some distress. However, international charity Save the Children has actually praised the News of the World’s sting for highlighting child trafficking. "Buying a child in India," the tabloid also quotes a senior official, Adrian Lovett, as saying, "is almost as easy as buying a Pot Noodle from your local corner shop". (Really, that easy?) But what about Indian officialdom and civil society? Why so quiet? When Azhar was slapped by his dad for refusing an interview (a paid-for one, some reports said), Union women and child development minister Renuka Chowdhury promised an enquiry into the slapping (where is the report, Ms Chowdhury?). But, revealingly, she said nothing about the ethics of journalists pressing a jetlagged 10-year-old for interviews. Isn’t it time to stand up for our children—against child-traffickers for sure—but also against brazen child-commodifiers, which the day-trippers to Garib Nagar, Indian and foreign, clearly are?

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