watch the movie Slumdog Millionaire what are the Social inequality shown in the movie give watch the movie Slumdog Millionaire what are the Social inequality shown in the movie give suggestions for
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Slumdog Millionaire follows the life of Jamal Malik, an 18-year-old boy who has suffered much growing up without parents and from doing odd jobs to survive. After years of separation, Jamal enters “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” in hopes of finding his childhood love, Latika, and his brother, Salim, but unexpectedly answers all the questions correctly. Considered as a “slumdog”, the game show host and police accuse Jamal of cheating and brutally interrogate him. Jamal explains that different occurrences of violent incidents throughout his life help him answer the questions on the game show. Through recalling painful memories and long explanations, Jamal is released and is given the chance to find his love ones as well as to win 20 million rupees.
Alterity, another theme of the movie, is a term meaning Otherness that was often used in describing the justification for colonization. Otherness refers to the “other” who is outcasted and treated indifferently (Lucero). “The Other” in this case is Jamal. The host does everything possible to convince him at each question to take the prize money and leave while he can. It is interpreted through his actions that the host does not want Jamal to win because Jamal is so different from the first and only winner of the show, himself. Prem, the host, goes as far as to trying to trick Jamal into losing by purposely giving him the wrong answer. Prem does this because he sees Jamal as “the Other” who is a threat to his beloved game show.
When Prem’s plan fails, he calls in higher authority, the police, to interrogate Jamal. The two policemen use different types of punishments on Jamal to force him to the tell the truth. This kind of violence inflicted on Jamal is called direct political violence. Direct political violence is violence that is administered by officials such as police torture as shown in Slumdog Millionaire (Bourgois, 426). After making it through the toughest stage of terror the police station offers, the head police officer reconsiders Jamal’s position as “the Other” and acknowledge the fact that Jamal could have been telling the truth the whole time. While the head police officer gives up using violence as a method to get Jamal to speak, the other police officer jumps in at every opportunity he can to inflict more violence on Jamal. It is seen in other scenes that the other officer is fully convinced by Prem of Jamal being a cheater because they share the view of Jamal as a slumdog. The concept of Otherness gives people the justification to treat people who are different from them unfairly; the concept of Otherness gave Prem and the policemen the justification to terrorize Jamal although he was telling the truth.
Slumdog Millionaire is a movie about a love story that has the audience rooting for the main characters to reunite and for the Jamal to win the money to change his life. While that is the surface view of the movie, Slumdog Millionaire holds a much deeper meaning. The examination of violence, specifically the four types that Bourgois mentions, throughout the movie is only one of the many different themes that are depicted in the movie but an important one. Dharavi, the setting, gave us a better understanding of what slums are like and the kinds of violence that surrounds the people of that community every day. The examination of Jamal’s character and his experiences of violence showed that terror and punishment are ways that are used to treat people as the “Other”. The consequences of the sexist relationships between Latika and other male characters result in different types of violences. On a more meaningful level Slumdog Millionaire informs us that there are many different forms of violence that surround and shape our everyday lives as seen in Jamal’s character.
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