Movie Review: Slumdog Millionaire

This movie tells a story of inequality, the unequal right to access wealth, and more cynically, the unequal right to compete in an already unequal world.

The "slumdog" Jamal was denied of the possibility of lasting until the final stage of the contest, even if this just could happen out of sheer chance, simply because he is "Jamal, the slumdog".

What a joke, and how sad such a joke is?

It is all too convenient to charge the price of such "misfortune" to a society dominated by a caste-based religion and with a history of hundreds of years of foreign invasion and colonization; and it is also all too easy to flatter the public opinion by dressing up a million-dollar-story with a purer motive of love. It would be harder to provoke your audience with the idea that they may share the very same prejudices.

I barely finished the movie, I barely had to.

Vincent Van Gogh

He cut off his left ear and sent it to a prostitute; he shot himself in the chest and lingered a slow death two days later. All these would be considered at least "bizarre" even in the modern democratic West, let alone the Victorian Europe he lived.

He was a genius. A genius is destined, or even "meant" to be misunderstood by his contemporaries.

It was not a tragedy, it was a fate.