A great true story, an ordinary fairytale

There is a whole story, behind Slumdog Millionaire, the greatest triumph of the last months. A UK-USA production that blinks at Bollywood tones and colours, Slumdog Millionaire is a modern times fairytale and contains all typical elements of this literary genre: a strongly typified setting, a poor but kind-hearted protagonist, who stops at nothing to find the love of his life; his brother, a co-protagonist hardened by poverty but capable of generosity, after all; a (quite helpless) beautiful girl, whom destiny has always been ungenerous to, and who will be freed by Prince Charming; some nasty antagonists, who do all they can to hinder the protagonist; dozens of difficulties and adventures, culminating in a shining happy ending.

Danny Boyle’s last movie is based on the best-selling novel Q&A, by Vikas Swarup. It shows the story of Jamal who, born and brought up in the backstreets of Mumbai, incredibly manages to arrive just one correct answer away from winning 20 million rupees on the TV game “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

Throughout the movie we assist to the brutalities faced by the small boy as he struggles to make it somehow, Dharavi slum hardships notwithstanding, and we understand that life itself, with its cruelty and harsh reality, has been teaching Jamal the correct answers.

Slumdog Millionaire – while meeting with the international public’s approval – has been said to have voyeuristic traits and de-contextualized poverty, making it a mere landscape on which an Indian model and a British boy pretend to be slum dwellers. Also, the movie insists on the rhetoric of dreaming, the faith in a lottery, “the drug of impossible hope”¹. Dev Patel (playing Jamal) himself gives the perfect example of this wide spread, socially accepted illusion, when he – who after all knows nothing about real life in real shanty towns – naively declares: “I think for a lot of people in the slums dreaming is what keeps them going”.



Does this mean that the dream of easily accessed richness is the only one poor people can hold on to? Professor Sugata Mitra does not think so.

And here starts the story behind Slumdog Milionnaire, a story whose inventor did not have a clue of what his creation was going to inspire.

It was 1999, when Mitra, a scientist in the fields of Cognitive Science, Information Science and Education Technology, was working as an academic in Delhi. His office was near Kalkaji slum and every morning, while going to work, he would meet the slum kids; during the day he would hear them playing in the dusty streets of their neighbourhood. This gave him the inspiration to put into practice an old idea, which had been in his mind since 1982. On a bright morning of January, his team opened a hole in the institute’s wall and installed a computer with an Internet connection on the other side, available for the slum dwellers.

The computer became an instant hit for the children who had never used such a machine before. Even if not taught about the functioning of the computer, in a month the children found a way to use it, understanding by themselves how to browse the Internet. The “Hole in the Wall” venture had begun.

Above: Hole in the Wall Project. Photo Courtesy - www.hole-in-the-wall.com & mediachannel.org

This first experiment gave a demonstration of the existence of an innate ability in all of us, which we can use effectively if only we’re given an opportunity. After Delhi, freely accessible computers were set in Shivpuri (Madhya Pradesh) and Madantusi (Uttar Pradesh), where Professor Mitra’s hypothesis were confirmed, leading him to define this as a new way of learning: “Minimally Invasive Education” was thus born.

Vikas Swarup, out of whose novel Slumdog Millionaire was made, has said his book was inspired by the “Hole in the Wall” experiment, and this has left Professor Mitra quite astonished. Swarup has taken the idea of unsupervised learning by children, and turned it into circumstantial learning, in which life itself is the only possible teacher. He has added a sparkling plot, an exciting atmosphere, a lot of suspense, a happy ending… and there it was, the perfect story for a successful movie. But the movie is not, as it has been said in the US, “about the joys of learning”² – and this is where the roads of Slumdog Millionaire and “Hole in the Wall” fork.

Because, unlike the former, the latter is about education.

The general context of “Hole in the Wall” project is the necessity of spreading education among those unprivileged communities and sectors of society, whose remoteness – both geographical and social – cause their marginalization and lack of opportunities. Recent estimations show that 25% of children of primary school age in rural areas of the developing world do not attend schools, compared with 16% of children of the same age living in urban areas.³

UN Millennium Development Goal 2 reads: “Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling”. Education is in fact the most effective solution against poverty and exploitation: illiteracy is still a central issue in several countries of the world, and a bondage which keeps too many people tied to their economic and social underdevelopment, unable to claim their rights.



In India, where the story of “Hole in the Wall” started, adult literacy rate was in year 2000, 68%
among men and 45% among women⁴ and even if the government has made substantial investments
to achieve universal elementary education by 2010, about 39% of primary students drop out of school, quality of education is poor because of high student-teacher ratio, and a large digital divide is growing between students of private schools and other students. This data of course represent a severe threat to development and growth.

But, besides cooperating to the general objective of eradicating illiteracy, Mitra’s idea has also a more specific purpose, concerning children’s dreams, that is, providing kids with a different point of view: monetary gain is not the only goal they can aspire to. Instead of running after the dream of changing from slumdog to millionaire, they can engage in something bigger and “aim to change the world”, as Professor Mitra puts it.

If it is true, as Dev Patel has said, that dreaming is what keeps marginalized people going; then they
should have the chance of doing it in a big way. They should be told that there is something more important out there than earning easy money or entering the star system; something that could really make the difference, and be of help for the marginalized communities they were born into. Something that, after all, could be worth working hard for, instead of hoping in a stroke of luck.

But the problem of children's exposure to poor heroes and – consequently – poor dreams does not concern the developing world only, or slum dwellers only, not at all. It is a wide spread trend, which invades the lives of children all over the world, especially in those pockets of economic, social and cultural poverty where kids seem to have the right to cherish only TV-like dreams.

In huge suburbs and dormitory towns, outside European industrial cities; in sleepy little towns in the middle of North American nowhere; in rural, out-of-the-way villages, scattered around the whole world; in ugly neighbourhoods, where the destitute are confined, as in a ghetto; under the bridges of the most beautiful and wealthiest cities; in the abusive settlements and camps outside our European cities, where those parts of society whom we don’t want to see take shelter, like they were rats… in all these places, which can be found anywhere in the world, kids are not provided with the possibility of having big dreams, and big heroes to imitate.

The challenge, then, is showing them an alternative, and this is what Professor Mitra has in mind. So, “Hole in the Wall” experiment has been expanded, and now counts 48 holes in Delhi and many Indian rural areas. It has been ‘exported’ to Cambodia and even UK, where there are places of socioeconomic hardships whose child inhabitants lack the right opportunities to build their own aspirations.

“Too many pupils at schools in the UK want to have careers as footballers or TV hosts, or models,
because that’s what they’re constantly exposed to as the heroes of our time. I use the Internet to introduce them to unlikely heroes, such as material about people working for Nasa, or volunteers in Congo, then I leave them to do their own research, unsupervised. […] After as little as eight or ten exposures, the kids have new dreams about what to do with their lives”, Professor Mitra says⁵. But if the film had been the story of a “Slumdog Nobel Laureate”, as Mitra suggested, it probably would not have been such a fabulous success.

Citations :

1. Roy, A., Caught on film: India ‘not shining’, Dawn, Mar 2, 2009, www.dawn.com
2. Lumenick, L., Slumderful, New York Post, Nov 12, 2008, www.nypost.com
3. www.un.org,
4. www.unicef.org
5. Tobin, L., Slumdog professor, The Guardian, Mar 03, 2009, www.guardian.co.uk
   
   

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ON THE OTHER SIDE : Below is a video that is not directly relevant to the article presented above, but it may bring a different perspective of the central theme of this article - the demonstration of existence of that innate ability in all of us which leads our growth and existence. In other words, the need to exist and grow is fulfilled by the creative spirit in us, in whatever the circumstance. 

Comments

wonderful article,heart touching!!
we all should unite to change the world and to make it a heaven.
The work of one is always an inspiration to other,so lets all of us do something to see heaven before death here on earth
each one should teach one:)