Sense and Sensibility

Critics of ‘Slumdog’ Should Turn their Ire inward

Not long after “Slumdog Millionaire” began to earn international acclaim for its clever narrative and chilling depiction of Indian slums, Indians began to cry foul.

“They are making out that India is a Third World, dirty underbelly, developing nation,” Amitabh Bachchan, one of the country’s leading Hindi film heroes, carped. Other Indian elites declaimed the film as offensive for its discomfiting focus on Mumbai slums. Some Mumbai tabloids denounced it as a “slum slam” or “poverty porn.” Indian movie director Priyadarshan called it a “cheap, trashy mediocre version” of Bollywood hits, adding that “If the Golden Globe and Oscar committees have chosen to honor this trashy film it just shows their ignorance of world cinema.”

Now that the Academy of Motion Pictures has confirmed its ignorance, curious filmgoers are expected to flock to “Slumdog Millionaire,” a riveting, enchanting film that follows a poor Mumbai tea boy who wins the top prize on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

Those filmgoers should prepare to be shocked.

The conditions that director Danny Boyle (unhelpfully for the Indians, a Brit) exposes in the Mumbai slums are vile and degrading – rows and rows of corrugated metal lean-tos, foul, fetid warrens of excrement and refuse in which people live. They were appalling enough to cause my chest to constrict and harrowing enough to send me out of the theater at least once just to catch my breath.

This, of course, is what art is supposed to do – entrance even as it disquiets. The strong reaction I had to the abject poverty in which Boyle sets his film, may not have been what he intended, but it can’t have been far from his mind. “Slumdog Millionaire” is one of the archetypal stories of humanity: poor boy with noble heart wins fame, fortune and the girl. The ancillary realities of the film – the filthy, forgotten slums that soil otherwise glittering Mumbai – may, in fact, be the most startling and therefore the most affecting parts of the movie.

That can only be for the good.

Regardless of what Bollywood stars say, poverty in India remains one of the country’s most dire and intractable problems. Nearly 65 million Indians, roughly a quarter of the urban population, live in slums, according to government surveys.

“Most of them are doomed to remain as they are,” Amitabh Kundu, dean of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Social Sciences in New Delhi, told Bloomberg News.

Mumbai

 itself is a city of 20 million people, nine million of whom live in slums, London’s Daily Mail reports, “raising families in shacks built from rubbish on top of open sewers.”

The Mail’s Andrew Malone reported on India’s “beggar mafia” who deliberately mutilate healthy children so that those children can earn extra money begging in the streets. The groups hack of the limbs of children, steal babies from hospitals and otherwise deform hundreds of the estimated 44,000 children who are kidnapped by these organizations annually – most of them never recovered and most between 8 and 10.

“The more a person is tortured or tormented, the more unfortunate he looks – all this will invoke more sympathy among the people who will then give them alms,” Mufti Imran, a researcher with Save the Children, told The National, of Abu Dhabi. A 2007 undercover investigation by an Indian news channel filmed three doctors in Delhi accepting $200 to amputate the limbs of kids who were abducted. Police later filed charges.

If you are living in a country where sociopaths are deforming and maiming healthy but desperate children so they can eek out a few dollars a day from a jaundiced public, you have more issues to confront than bad publicity.

The best art sheds light on depravity, even as it unfurls an absorbing story.

“Slumdog Millionaire” is far from the best movie I’ve seen, but it is one of the few that inspired me to write a check. Both Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children have posts in India, where its workers do not deny the obvious, but strive, as “Slumdog’s” critics might, to improve the life of India’s estimated 300,000 child beggars, who make our recession look like a day on Easy Street.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

The Double-edges Sword of Identity

 A Jewish friend of mine is a worried.

Her daughter has fallen for a man who would be considered a “catch” by almost any measure: Tall, dark, handsome, erudite and considerate [Dash] he is a young man in a lucrative profession with an auspicious career ahead of him. But there’s a catch to this “catch.” The young man is not Jewish. He’s Hindu.

For my friend, this presents a problem. If the romance proceeds apace, will her daughter’s Jewish identity erode? This is a prickly issue for Jews, who have endured the Inquisition, pogroms and the Holocaust. To lose another Jew to the fancy of romance can seem a little capricious. This is far more portentous than my marriage to Protestant [Dash] an occasion for excommunication in my grandfather’s day that merited a shrug from my father.

I thought about my friend’s conflict in relation to two recent events that have underscored the difficulty in preserving one’s cultural identity in the face of a rising tide of homogenization. The first was the release of “Unaccustomed Earth,” by Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who writes about the chasm between expatriate Bengali parents and their American-raised children. The second was last year’s Irish rejection of the monumental Lisbon Treaty, which the European Union is promoting to reconstitute its cumbersome bureaucracy.

The events may appear unrelated. What, after all does a wistful Bengali immigrant have in common with an Irish electorate mucking up the clunky works of the European Union? More than you might expect.

The Irish, who have benefited from millions in EU subsidies, remain peevish about all this “European” business, worrying that Ireland has struck a Faustian bargain that will dilute not only Ireland’s political voice, but its identity. They’re not the only ones. Nobody but the poorer European countries seem aflutter about their “European” identity. As my Irish cousin says, “Who’s Irish anymore?”

A similar question might be asked of the characters in Lahiri’s novel “Unaccustomed Earth.” As she did in her debut collection of stories,”Interpreter of Maladies,” Lahiri wrestles with melancholy of the Bengali immigrants, struggling to inculcate their culture in the hearts of their defiantly Americanized children. It is a battle that leaves them with a longing for an identity they had taken for granted.

The Indian father of the title story is baffled by his tow-headed grandson, who has yet to see India and seems more comfortable in an L.A. mall. “The more the children grew, the less they had seemed to resemble either parent-they spoke differently, dressed differently, seemed foreign in every way,” Lahiri writes.

This, I think, is what we fear most when we talk about an erosion of cultural identity [Dash] that the people who come out of us will have nothing in common with us. We will have no points of communion, no exceptionality of experiences that we use as a shorthand to communicate. Something of our cultural essence will slip away.

Because her faith is important to her, I suspect my friend’s daughter will cling to her religious identity, regardless of whom she marries. But I suspect she grew up in a household that was less redolent of the Jewish heritage than that of her mother, just as my own Irish-Catholic girlhood was less dogmatic and definitive than my grandmother’s. Inexorably, we distance ourselves from the particularity of our culture, to an agreeable indistinctness.

What that means is that today I am free to be enriched by my friendships with Jews [Dash] friendships my grandparents would never have considered. But a certain intensity of identity is gone, and we cannot be surprised by those who continue to mourn it.

Picasso and Visual Language

Nobody seemed to need words less than Pablo Picasso. Language seemed to spew out of him, twisting and shattering into a new visual vocabulary, at once subversive and traditional. Such a versatile artist, who rearranged the rubrics of the visual, might seem to find words redundant or restrictive. And, yet, in the same way that Picasso could not contain himself in medium or style, he was unwilling or unable to restrict himself to the visual. Words, with all of their clumsy constraints and imprecision, seemed to pour out of him.

Perhaps, as the Yale University Art Gallery suggests in its winning exhibit, “Picasso and the Allure of Language,” it was Picasso’s association with all those riotous writers — Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, Paul Eluard and, inevitably, Gertrude Stein. As they were deconstructing language, he was deconstructing form.

Their intersection was inescapable and decisive. Picasso would, at one point, take a year off from painting to write poetry, which may, as the exhibit demonstrates, have been the most surreal work to come out of him.

So difficult is it to imagine Picasso without the hive of writers and artists around him, the “bande à Picasso,” as his Paris circle was known in Montmartre, that it’s surprising that Yale’s is the first exhibit to look at language itself [Dash] words [Dash] as another form with which Picasso toyed.

And toy he did, splicing and splattering words throughout his works, snaking through the works of celebrated writers and creating a few missives himself. The dance between Picasso and words was not exclusively narrative; in fact, as the exhibit emphasizes, Picasso worked hard to break the alliance between word and meaning, emphasizing instead the surface and patterns of the words. But words are freighted. And Picasso at once rejects and uses that, a flexibility that is as breathtaking as it is confounding.

The objects the museum has included are expansive; they range from his earliest pre-war cubist works through his return to classicism and fitful engagement through surrealism through his later work in the 1960s. Many of these objects, like the seminal “First Steps” and the stunning “Dog and Cock,” have been long celebrated but curator Susan Greenberg Fisher looks at them in new ways.

“First Steps,” for example, seems to contain only the most Laconian allusion to language – a child’s first step is a rough developmental equivalent to his first words. But Fisher sees in the folds of the child’s jumper and in an early sketch of the child’s feet, an obvious reference to newspapers, one of Picasso’s frequent sketching materials.

Indeed, a closer look reveals forms that resemble a folded hat composed of newspapers. More suggestively, “Dog and Cock,” with its columnar composition and gray, crumpled shape, flecked with inky blacks, is more obviously a newspaper, perhaps the very one in which the five cylindrical objects, suggestive of fruit, were wrapped. The fruit itself, with its hard, black-on-white colors, recall the keys of a typewriter. But the most illustrative of the exhibit’s intent is clearly Picasso’s “Dice, Packet of Cigarettes and Visiting Card,” which he gave to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas after the pair visited him when he was not at home. As was customary, the two left their calling card,a simple, black-on-white affair that read “Miss Stein” and “Miss Toklas,” with the right edge folded over.

Here is Picasso’s visual poetry in full flower. He creates a still life that is a combination Trompe l’oeil and cubism to celebrate friendship and the inspiration it generates. He paints a black-and-white dice and pack of L’Elegance cigarettes, overlaying the carde-de-visite.

The tidy horizontal work, done in early 1914, includes a glued label from the cigarette pack with the words “contributions indirectes” (a tax). The inference is clear; it was Picasso’s creation, but Stein and Toklas, with their stimulating cultural circle, were indirectly engaged in Picasso’s artistic process.

It is that circle of literary glitterati that is perhaps most enviable and less conceivable today. Stein memorably wrote that Paris was<$> the 20th century, by which she probably meant her own Saturday salon on the rue de Fleurus, where the avant-garde clutch of writers, artists and thinkers assembled. If they shared anything it was a love of the new and a collective desire to de-fang tradition. Picasso could probably not have helped lacerating his canvases with words; they were the oxygen of that heady group.

Female portraits

“Picasso’s language is the language of relation,” writes Mary Ann Caws in the handsome exhibit catalog. That is, of course, most obvious in the alternately rhapsodic and disfiguring portraits of the women in his life. But Yale’s exhibit underscores the fertile and enduring relationship Picasso had with the written language, “illustrating,” as only Picasso could, a myriad books, from Apollinaire, to Balzac (of whom several of Picasso’s stunning portraits are displayed) to Pierre Reverdy and Tristan Tzara. All the drawings buzz with Picasso’s singular voice, but what’s interesting is when and why Picasso makes the decision to be denotative, as in the last of his 13 etchings for Balzac’s, and when he decides to be enigmatically, impenitently himself.

It is easy, of course, to riff on a Dadaist like Tzara or a surrealist like Apollinaire. But Ovid? Or Aristophanes? Picasso illustrated texts of both of these classicists (respectively, “Metamorphoses” and “Lysistrata,”), and, as Fisher writes, encourages readers to read “not only with our eyes, but also with our body.” Boundaries are erased; limbs, flanks and torsos merge and disappear. In Picasso’s illustrations for Reverdy’s “Le chant des morts,” the brush itself disappears and Picasso essentially fingerpaints the whole volume, using just three or four glyphs. Just as words are restricted by letters, he asserts, so too are visuals restricted by their own language.

Identifiably pablo

Picasso had what writers call “voice,” that unity of style that makes an artists’ work distinctive. His penmanship, as in “Sur le dos de l’immense tranche de melon ardent,” is as identifiably Picasso as the glorious pencil drawing “Man and Woman with a Bird.”

Even the bold, primitive, tomato-red glyphs that Picasso created for Reverdy’s “Le chant des morts (The Song of the Dead), a meditation on mortality, are distinctively his and tell a different, but complimentary story than Reverdy. Picasso was clearly thinking of illuminated manuscripts, with their calligraphic marginalia. Yet, Picasso’s cursive lines and elongated ball-and-chains explode with a puckish sense of fancy that leavens Reverdy’s poems.

Picasso himself referred to his “novelist” quality, telling photographer Robert Otero, “I spend hour after hour while I draw observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they’re up to: basically, it’s my way of writing fiction.” “Picasso and The Allure of Language” reminds viewers of the stories Picasso told, and the pantheon of tools he used to invoke it.

What’s At Risk When We Lose Newspapers

A couple of months ago, my dental hygienist asked me what I did for a living.

When I told her, she stared blankly, shrugged and said, “I don’t read a newspaper.”
 It’s not as if I had never heard that before.
 What was different was the indifference with which she said it. Plenty of people don’t read the newspaper anymore — but they typically have the good sense to feel guilty about it. “I really should,” they confess, as if newspaper reading were a bit like flossing.
 No doubt business is better in the floss market than it is in newspapers, where the mood, to quote the executive editor of the New York Times, is “funereal.”
 Last year, the Hartford Courant announced that it would eliminate nearly 60 positions, shrink its number of news pages and deep-six its Connecticut section.
The news followed similarly bleak disclosures from The Baltimore Sun, which is slashing 100 jobs; The Palm Beach Post, which is cutting 300; The Boston Herald, which will eliminate 130 to 160 jobs; Gannett, which eliminated 1,000 jobs, and the McClatchy Group, owner of The Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee and others, where 1,400 jobs will be eliminated.
The culprit? Advertising revenue, which the Newspaper Association of America says plummeted 18 percent, or $2 billion, in the third quarter of last year. Add in the increased costs for newsprint, higher health insurance costs for employees, and increased competition from the Internet, and you’ve got what The New Yorker calls “a palpable sense of doom” in newsrooms. So desperate have newspapers become that, this past week, The New York Times began running color ads on its esteemed front page. The company reported that advertising revenue dropped nearly 21 percent in November.
 Most (51 percent) Americans get their daily news from their local TV station — where the staples are crime, gore and weather-hype (”Apocalyptic deluge imminent. News at 10″). Saying you get your news from local TV is a bit like saying you enjoy French cuisine because you’ve been to Au Bon Pain.
 Meanwhile, only 40 percent of Americans read a daily newspaper. That readership is largely male and typically older, despite the lame visual gymnastics newspapers have tried to make their product eye-catching. Newspapers rebuff suggestions that they’ve “dumbed down,” but anybody with a brain can tell you the newspaper you read today looks like a comic strip next to the one you read in 1974, when 77.6 percent of Americans read one.
 But in 1974, there was no Internet, no cable TV and no satellite radio. There was also a gravity to news that is absent in today’s entertainment-drenched culture, where network news anchors, like Katie Couric, launch YouTube pages to jack up their hip quotient. None of this vaudevillian stuff has helped — and some of it may have hurt. In the last three years, independent, publicly-traded American newspapers have lost 42 percent of their market value, reports The New Yorker.

 Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. From 1999 to 2004, newspaper circulation dropped by 1.3 million, says The Newspaper Association of America. This for a product that costs less than a candy bar.
 All of that can make a news hound feel more than a little irrelevant. Yet, the risk of complaining about declining newspaper readership is two-fold. First, one is preaching to the choir. Second, I, of course, have a vested interest in the future of newspapers. My frustration is that too few Americans realize that they do, too. Just look at the desperate measures the General Assembly is taking to try to save the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press, two of what may be a slew of Journal Register newspapers scheduled to go to the gallows. What the legislators understand is that it’s about more than the newspapers. It’s about the community.
Nobody goes into reporting for the money. Journalism school graduates are the lowest-paid college-educated people in the labor force. Their average starting salary is $26,000 annually, miles less than the $36,694 that a starting teacher in Connecticut makes. But like teachers, they are believers. They cleave to this hoary notion that informed citizens actually produce a better society.
 I’m not sure what F & S Oil customers would have done had they not had the local newspaper to inform them of their options. I’m not sure who else would have celebrated when the Wolcott Tech girls’ basketball team snapped a 265-game losing streak last December. I don’t know how many children in the Archdiocese of Boston might have been at risk for rape had The Boston Globe not exposed the priestly pedophilia crisis in 2000. Or how wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Hospital would have fared had The Washington Post not exposed their mistreatment, a series that evoked a national outcry and produced reforms by federal officials.
When my hygienist told me that she didn’t read newspapers, there was a part of me that wanted to say, “How dare you?” because behind the newspaper downturn is an overall dismissal of news that doesn’t intimately concern her. As one 38-year-old told me, “I turn on CNN and make sure the world hasn’t exploded. I turn on Scott Haney to make sure I can ride my bike. Other than that, I have no interest.”
In other words, “If it doesn’t concern me, what do I care?”
 With attitudes like that, newspaper survival is the least of our problems.

Woods are Good For Kids

The other night I was telling my son a story about my tree fort.
 I hadn’t thought about the place in years. But every time I give my son P.J. a bath, I’m flooded with the memory of the place. The scent of Johnson & Johnson shampoo sends me back to my childhood, when my mother used to bathe us in Tide.
Yes, Tide, the abrasive laundry detergent with the little aqua grains. It sounds punishing, but the truth is, my mother had little choice. By the time my brothers and I dragged ourselves out of the woods and back into our home at twilight, we were embedded with dirt. Muck clung to us. We were studded with burrs. We reeked of skunk cabbage. The Tide was astringent. But it worked. It was handy. And my mother was anything if not resourceful.

My mother certainly worried about filth, but what’s peculiar to me now in retrospect, is that she never worried about us. She certainly didn’t worry about us in the woods, which had a kind of halo effect for her. The woods, that tangle of poison ivy, skunk cabbage, streams, tadpoles, birch and burrs, was our babysitter.
 Not any more.
 In “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature —Deficit Disorder,” Richard Louv claims today’s children are spending less time in the woods, instead risking depression, attention deficit disorder and a host of other disorders by being plugged into entertainment media.
It’s a tough claim to make. Few rigorous studies have examined the amount of time kids spend outdoors. But it seems anecdotally true. Our kids are no longer “The Little Rascals.” They’re “The Jetsons.”
The woods were where my brothers and I spent most of our time. The woods had the advantage of (we thought) belonging to no one, and therefore were unfettered by niggling parental rules. The nearby park, with its swing sets, ball fields and aluminum slide, was attractive enough. But its classic attractions were, by comparison, stultifying. You knew what you were supposed to do in a park. In the woods, you were left to your imagination and nature’s caprice. There was always the possibility that you would tumble into a stream, be impaled by a thorn bush or (my fear) bitten by a snake. All of this and more happened to me, of course, but none of it proved fatal.
What was particularly attractive about the woods, though, was the certainty that my mother would never venture into it. She would shout our names madly and with spine-tingling inflection out the back door, but there was simply no way my mother was going to machete her way through the thicket to find our secret hideout. My mother was tough. But she did not like bugs.
 And so, in the feudal society that was the suburban forest, my playmates and I carved up dominions and claimed them for ourselves. We trawled through the local landfill and slunk around Dumpsters looking for scrap wood from which to construct our tree forts. We used pieces of bureaus. Highway signs. The ends of crates. Little by little, the mosaic form came into place and we had our own tree fort, complete with lookout tower and scheming room.
 I told my son all of this, but I left out the part about the air rifles. The slingshots, too. I didn’t mention them. Or the saplings whose ends we would whittle into a needle-sharp point and use for sword fights. Oh, and the time I fell out of the tree fort and on to my head. I left that out, too.
 The more I told my son about the tree house, the more dangerous it seemed. The more interested he became in building a tree house, the more resolute I grew that I would never let him have one. The more animated he turned about wandering through the woods, the more of an idiot I felt for ever bringing this up in the first place.
 Who knows what kind of sociopath could be out skulking around out there? And the woods are choked with poison ivy. To say nothing of the ticks. Lyme disease festers in the woods. Then there are the mosquitos. They might have been infected with West Nile. And what kind of a mother would let her child run around unsupervised in such a perilous pit?
Ah, but P.J. What wonders you will miss. Let’s grab a hammer. I’ll come, too.
Contact: Tracey@Traceyosh.com

Written by Tracey O’Shaughnessy, c. Republican-American, 2006

Stranger Danger and Real Parental Fear

My son can’t sleep. He wakes in the middle of the night, asking if the doors are locked.
 He’s been following me around the house like a tail. If he loses sight of me, he lets loose a deafening wail that sends the dog under the bed.
“Mommy! Where are you?!”
“PJ, what are you afraid of?” I ask.
“Everything,” he says.
That narrows it down.
 A few months ago, my 6-year-old son came home from school with a worksheet encouraging him to “Run,” “Report” and “Remember.” It included coloring sheets in which some scary dude jumps out of a car and tries to nab a kid. The police officer in town dropped by to reinforce the urgency of staying away from strangers. In my day, a stranger was a friend you hadn’t met. For my son, a stranger is the pervert hanging around the jungle gym.
It’s tempting to wonder what kind of thoughts raced through my son’s mind. He cannot possibly know the depths of degeneracy that lead a pervert like Waterbury, CT’s John Regan to prowl around high school parking lots, looking for prey. He couldn’t possibly imagine the moral turpitude of snakes like John Mark Karr, who find some sort of twisted pleasure in shattering a child’s innocence. Most of these high-profile abuse cases — people like Richard Allen Davis, who abducted and killed Polly Klaas — beggar the imagination.
I don’t begrudge the school its “stranger danger” program. It would be scandalous if a school wasn’t able to secure kids from hoodlums (particularly since they’ve been so diligent about saving them from cupcakes).
Last year, an Associated Press investigation found 2,570 cases from 2001 to 2005 in which teachers were punished or removed from the classroom for sexual misconduct. The allegations ranged from fondling to rape. The AP noted a 2004 Congressional report that estimated that 4.5 million students out of 50 million in American public schools “are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade.”
 Now that sounds pretty grave —that is, until you realize that there are 6.8 million people teaching 77 million students this country. My math is not terrific, but that means you’ve got .0094 percent of teachers engaged in this nefarious business.
 Similarly, I’d have to argue that the worst stains on the Roman Catholic Church, outside of the Crusades, was the pedophilia scandal, first reported in 2000. But, according to the best statistics we have, only about 4 percent of priests who served between 1950 and 2002 were the subject of allegations of child sexual abuse. The report, by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, does not factor in the number of kids who were too traumatized or terrorized to speak up, but it still helps to put those numbers in perspective.
Back to my son’s concerns. Just how real is the danger of being abducted by some monster? Pretty darned rare. The Department of Justice reports that “stereotypical kidnappings” account for a tiny percentage of all child abductions — about 115 a year.
The ugly truth of the matter is that in the vast majority of cases in which kids are kidnapped, the abductors are estranged parents, other family members, or people they know.
 Some 90 percent of child abuse is committed by family members and acquaintances, said Kenneth V. Lanning, a retired FBI agent who is a consultant for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Eighty percent is done in the home. And most of it is done before the child is 5.
The eerie reality is that those whom we are most inclined to trust may be those who deserve it least.
Perhaps it’s human nature to fetishize a bogeyman, rather than confront the deviant in our midst.
But evil is not foreign or external. For many children, it is what makes home anything but sweet.

Written by Tracey O’Shaughnessy. c. Republican-American, 2007