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Dear friends,
Here I am again with another installment of explanation of Mirza Ghalib’s verses, for your enjoyment. I am sending a link for complete explanation that includes Urdu and Gujarati script. This is probably faster and a better way.
Please hold control key and then click the link; Ghalib’s 52nd installment Kuchh na ki, apne junun-e-na-rasa ne, varna yaaN in Urdu and Gujarati script will open. Please allow ten seconds to download. This is my own work and is stored in my own server-space. It is popup and virus free.
CLICK below, Don’t miss; it is very beautiful.

http://lists.elistx.com/archives/blank/200903/docAEkP9WL3pU.doc

For those who have joined now, let me say few words about this Ghalib series.

Ghalib, his Ghazals, his poems, his genius, and his wits have always fascinated millions of Urdu lovers including myself. Those who want to read my previous work please send me an email request; I will email back my previous explanations just for asking.

This is my 52nd installment. I have received excellent response from many friends, both Urdu and non-Urdu speakers. Please know that this is my own, Asghar Vasanwala’s, work and not a forwarding of someone else’s work as some of you might have thought. Please forward this to your friends. Also, please send me your comments/complements. I will appreciate if you forward me email addresses of your Urdu/non-Urdu friends.

Here is today’s verse (She’r) & its explanation in Urdu, Gujarati, and English.

For past issues and much more please do visit my Ghalib website http://www.mirza-ghalib.org
I guarantee, you’ll enjoy

These are the 4th & 5th verses of Ghalib’s 16th Ghazal.

Verse 4
Kuchh na ki, apne junun-e-na-rasa ne, varna yaaN
My short falling love craze deprived me, otherwise here on this earth,
Zar’ra zar’ra, rookaksh-e-khursheed-e-aalam tab tha
Every particle dares the world-shining mighty sun
Kuch na ki = didn’t do any thing, kept deprived Junun-e-na-rasa = love craze that fell short in reaching the target
Zar’ra Zar’ra= every particle Rookash = Daring, Challenging Khursheed=Sun Aalam taab=world shining

Verse 2
Aaj kyoN parva nahiN, apne aseeroN ki tujhe?
Why you do not care for your love-captives, anymore?
Kal talak, tera bhi dil, mehr-o-vafa ka baab tha
Until yesterday, your heart was a fountain of care and loyalty
parva = care Aseer=captive
Mehr = kindness, vafa=loyalty baab=chapter, door, mother fountain

Meaning:
In the following verses, Ghalib complains about his under reaching love and about his beloved’s indifferent attitude.

Verse 4:- In this verse, Ghalib laments his failed love. He says my short falling love kept me from success. My short falling love craze earned me a defeat. Otherwise, in this world, a tiny valueless particle dares the world shining mighty sun. In other words because my love fell short on its target, I became inferior to even a tiny particle. Had my love succeeded or even if I had perished in love and became dust, every particle of my dust would have dared the world shining mighty sun.

Every particle has capacity to become a sun. Every particle has an urge becoming a sun. Anyone pursuing single-mindedly can become God. However, a weak person cannot achieve this stage. Upanishad mentions that a weak person cannot see his soul.

Verse 5: In this verse, Ghalib talks about the changed attitude of his beloved. He says I do not understand what has happened to you. We, who are captive and bound in love, you do not care for them, anymore. Before, you were not like this. In past, your heart was also was gushing with love and loyalty and you took good care of your captive lovers.

When our own, for whom we forfeit our souls and hearts, keep away from us and become indifferent, this verse comes to our mind.

Salam,

Asghar Vasanwala can be reached at asgharf@att.net

By Ingrid B. Mork

I watch Aljazeera a lot..
In the last episode of Inside Story, the debate was about the US, China, and economy.. One of the panelists, a guy called Max Kaiser, speaking from Paris, made a rather interesting observation. He said that those who tried to subvert US interests had US marines turn up to “sort them out,” Saddam Hussein of Iraq was invaded, captured and beheaded, then the finger started pointing in the direction of Iran, with the sanctions and the threats. I don`t think his observations were so far-fetched. There was the air strike on Syria, a cross border raid on a village in Iran, on the border with Iraq and, more recently, an air strike on a convoy in Sudan. No-one is sure who carried out that airstrike, the US or Israel, to me it`s immaterial, they have the same agenda and have no qualms about doing one another`s “dirty work.”
Now there`s talk of putting troops, whether British or American, into the Gaza Strip. Now, I`m not naive, and I doubt very much that the troops would be there for the benefit of the people of Gaza. I think it may be the gas fields off the coast of Gaza which are probably of interest to the US, the UK, Israel and Egypt. There is also some very nice real estate which is probably of interest to the Israelis, once they`re finished appropriating what they want of the West Bank. Of course, I could be wrong, could be I`m libeling decent caring people, but I doubt it.

Ingrid B. Mork lives in Norway and can be reached at ingridbm.mrk279@gmail.com

By DONNA ABU-NASR

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Before her wedding last year, Huda Batterjee went abroad to buy her bridal lingerie – she just couldn’t bear the humiliation of discussing her most intimate apparel with a man. She had little choice: there are almost no saleswomen in Saudi Arabia. Now a group of Saudi women – sick of having to deal with male sales staff when buying bras or panties, not to mention frilly negligees or thongs – have launched a campaign this week to boycott lingerie stores until they employ women.
It’s an irony of the kingdom’s strict segregation of the sexes. Only men are employed as sales staff to keep women from having to deal with male customers or work around men.
But in lingerie stores, that means men are talking to women about bras or thongs, looking them up and down to determine their cup sizes, even rubbing the underwear to show how stains can be washed out.
The result is mortifying for everyone involved – shoppers, salesmen, even the male relatives who accompany the women.
“When I buy underwear in Saudi, some salesmen say, ‘This is not the right size for you,'” said Batterjee. “You feel almost taken advantage of. Why is he looking at me in this way?”
So for her wedding trousseau, the 26-year-old went to neighboring Dubai to shop. She now lives in Virginia with her husband.
Heba al-Akki, a businesswoman who supports the boycott, said when she shops for underwear, “I go to a store, pick this, this and that and leave quickly. It’s as if I’m buying illegal stuff.”
It’s not easy on the salesmen either.
At one lingerie boutique in a Riyadh mall Wednesday, salesmen blushed when asked about their jobs. All said they back the campaign to hire female sales staff.
“Even in such open regions as the U.S. and Europe, men do not sell underwear to women,” said store manager Husam al-Mutayim, a 27-year-old Egyptian. “I don’t let any of my female relatives buy underwear from men. It’s just too embarrassing.”
Mannequins – headless in keeping with a ban on realistic depictions of women – were displayed in the shop window dressed in modest pajamas. Inside, racks held an array of colorful bras, lacy panties and sexy nighties – along with more day-to-day undergarments.
Under Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islamic law, women are required to cover themselves head-to-toe in black robes in public. But in the privacy of their own homes – and bedrooms – they can wear whatever they want, and sexy undergarments are popular.
But buying them is another story. Fitting rooms are banned in the kingdom – the idea of a woman undressing in a public place with men just outside is unthinkable. So a woman is never sure she has chosen the right size until she gets it home.
“I have bras with sizes ranging from 32 to 38 because I can’t get to try them on,” said Modie Batterjee, Huda’s sister and one of the boycott organizers.
Even male relatives get dragged into the embarrassment. Women are allowed to shop without a male relative, but husbands or brothers sometimes insist on coming along – or the women want them there – to ensure salesmen stay respectful.
Modie Batterjee recalls how her husband fled a lingerie store because he could not bear to hear her explain to a salesman that she wanted high-waisted underwear to hold in her tummy after their daughter’s birth.
The boycott was launched on Tuesday by about 50 women who gathered in the Red Sea port of Jiddah at the Al-Bidaya Breast-feeding Resource and Women’s Awareness Center, which is run by Modie Batterjee.
The aim is to push for implementation of a law that has been on the books since 2006 which says only female staff can be employed in women’s apparel stores.
The law has never been put into effect, partly due to hard-liners in the religious establishment who oppose employing women in mixed environments like malls, where religious police are always on the lookout to keep men and women from interacting.
Hiring women would also deprive men of jobs in a country where more than 10 percent of men are unemployed.
“We are raising awareness and calling for the implementation of the law,” said Reem Asaad, a finance lecturer at Dar al-Hikma Women’s College in Jiddah, who supports the boycott.
The campaign calls on women to shop at the country’s few women-only lingerie stores. Usually stand-alone boutiques or located in malls that have women-only sections, these shops have no windows to ensure passing men cannot look in – and giving women the freedom to actually try things on.
How much impact the boycott call will have is unclear. Almost 1,700 people signed an online petition posted by Asaad on the social networking Web site Facebook. A few Saudi papers have written about it, but the campaign depends mostly on word of mouth.
Not all women support the idea. At the Riyadh lingerie shop on Wednesday, one woman – only her eyes visible through the black veil covering her face – said she is suspicious of women-only lingerie shops.
“Bad things happen there,” she said.
What might that be?
Women can sneak a picture of you changing with their mobile phones, she replied and refused to give her name.
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(Submitted by a reader)

The activity of genes in men’s brains begins to change sooner than it does in women’s brains, a new study shows.

By Tina Hesman Saey

Men and women’s brains age differently, a new study demonstrates.
Researchers led by Carl Cotman and Nicole Berchtold at the University of California, Irvine, find that the activity of genes in men’s brains begins to change earlier than it does in women’s brains. The types of genes that change with age also differ between the sexes.
The study, which appears online September 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found that in both genders, each part of the brain examined had its own pattern of aging.
“This is a very interesting study in what is, curiously, an under-studied area, normal aging,” says Etienne Sibille, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study. “You have a combination of expected and surprises in each finding.” For instance, the fact that men and women’s brains age differently could be predicted based on women’s increased longevity, but the type and scope of the differences were unexpected, he says.
Cotman and Berchtold and their colleagues collected brains from people who had died of various causes between ages 20 and 99. The researchers isolated messenger RNA, or mRNA, from the people’s brains. Messenger RNA is a courier molecule that carries instructions encoded in genes to the cellular machinery that will build proteins using those instructions. Genes that produce higher levels of mRNA are more active.
The researchers examined gene activity in four parts of the brain: the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex, the postcentral gyrus and the superior frontal gyrus.
Brain scientists expect changes in gene activity as the brain ages, and previous studies have demonstrated some changes in other parts of the brain. Cotman and his colleagues thought the parts of the brain that would have the most change in gene activity would be the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, because they are most vulnerable to diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer’s.
But the team discovered that these disease-susceptible parts of the brain in older people have the least amount of change in gene activity when compared to younger people. In contrast, the postcentral gyrus, a part of the brain dedicated to perception, changes most. Scientists had expected that region to have the least change, if any.
“This is one of those fun head-scratchers, which is what science is all about,” Cotman says.
Overall gene activity was similar in people aged 20 to 59. And people aged 60 to 99 showed similar patterns of overall gene activity. But the team detected variability in their data. Cotman and Berchtold sat down to discuss the source of the variability and decided to see whether gender differences might explain it. “She thought it was the men, and I said it was the women,” Cotman laughs.
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India’s Muslims are prominent in Bollywood but still struggle with their identity. In the wake of the Mumbai attacks, tensions have mounted and loyalties have been tested. Ramachandra Guha on the path forward for India and its Muslim minority.
In October 1947, a bare six weeks after India and Pakistan achieved their independence from British rule, the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote a remarkable letter to the Chief Ministers of the different provinces. Here Nehru pointed out that despite the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, there remained, within India, “a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want, go anywhere else. That is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State.”
In the wake of the recent incidents in Mumbai, these words make salutary reading. It seems quite certain that the terrorists who attacked the financial capital were trained in Pakistan. The outrages have sparked a wave of indignation among the middle class. Demonstrations have been held in the major cities, calling for revenge, in particular for strikes against training camps in Pakistan. The models held up here are Israel and the United States; if they can “take out” individual terrorists and invade whole countries, ask some Indians, why not we?

Other commentators have called for a more measured response. They note that the civilian government in Islamabad is not in control of the army, the army not in control of the notorious Inter Services Intelligence agency, the ISI not in control of the extremists it has funded. They point out that Pakistan has itself been a victim of massive terror attacks. India, they say, should make its disapproval manifest in other ways, such as canceling sporting tours and recalling diplomats. At the same time, the United States should be asked to demand of Pakistan, its erratically reliable ally, that it act more decisively against the terrorists who operate from its soil.
One short-term consequence of the terror in Mumbai is a sharpening of hostility between India and Pakistan. And, as is always the case when relations between these two countries deteriorate, right-wing Hindus have begun to scapegoat those Muslims who live in India. They have begun to speculate as to whether the attackers were aided by their Indian co-religionists, and to demand oaths of loyalty from Muslim clerics and political leaders.
There are 150 million Muslims in India. They have gained particular prominence in one area: Bollywood. Several top directors and composers are Muslim, as well as some of India’s biggest movie stars. One, Aamir Khan, was a star and producer in “Lagaan,” a song-and-dance epic about a game of cricket that was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002. But Muslims are massively underrepresented in the professions — few of India’s top lawyers, judges, doctors and professors are Muslim. Many Indian Muslims are poor, and a few are angry.
Pakistan was carved out of the eastern and western portions of British India. To this new nation flocked Muslims from the Indian heartland. Leading the migration were the lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs who hoped that in a state reserved for people of their faith, they would be free of competition from the more populous (and better educated) Hindus.
Pakistan was created to give a sense of security to the Muslims of the sub-continent. In fact, it only made them more insecure. Nehru’s letter of October 1947 was written in response to a surge of Hindu militancy, which called for retribution against the millions of Muslims who stayed behind in India. Three months later, Mahatma Gandhi, who was both Father of the Indian Nation as well as Nehru’s mentor, was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic. That act shamed the religious right, who retreated into the shadows. There they stayed until the 1970s, when, through a combination of factors elaborated upon below, they came to occupy center-stage in Indian politics.
If the first tragedy of the Indian Muslim was Partition, the second has been the patronage by India’s most influential political party, the Congress, of Muslims who are religious and reactionary rather than liberal and secular. Nehru himself was careful to keep his distance from sectarian leaders whether Hindu or Muslim. However, under the leadership of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, the Congress party came to favor the conservative sections of the Muslim community. Before elections, Congress bosses asked heads of mosques to issue fatwas to their flock to vote for the party; after elections, the party increased government grants to religious schools and colleges. In a defining case in 1985, the Supreme Court called for the enactment of a common civil code, which would abolish polygamy and give all women equal rights regardless of faith — the right to their husband’s or father’s property, for example, or the right to proper alimony once divorced. The prime minister at the time was Rajiv Gandhi. Acting on the advice of the Muslim clergy, he used his party’s majority in Parliament to nullify the court’s verdict. After Rajiv’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, became Congress president in 1998, the party has continued to fund Muslim religious institutions rather than encourage them to engage with the modern world.
Partition and Congress patronage between them dealt a body blow to Muslim liberalism. The first deprived the community of a professional vanguard; the second consolidated the claims to leadership of priests and theologians. In an essay published in the late 1960s, the Marathi writer Hamid Dalwai (a resident of Mumbai) wrote of his community that “the Muslims today are culturally backward.” To be brought “on a level with the Hindus,” argued Dalwai, the Muslims needed an “avant garde liberal elite to lead them.” Otherwise, the consequences were dire for both communities. For “unless a Muslim liberal intellectual class emerges, Indian Muslims will continue to cling to obscurantist medievalism, communalism, and will eventually perish both socially and culturally. A worse possibility is that of Hindu revivalism destroying even Hindu liberalism, for the latter can succeed only with the support of Muslim liberals who would modernize Muslims and try to impress upon these secular democratic ideals.”

Ramachandra Guha is the author of ‘India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy.’ He lives in Bangalore.
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(Submitted by Shahabuddin Haji)

Read the movie’s review
Director Corey Yuen’s work here is fast, exciting and, above all, clean. One of the best action directors in the world, Yuen never sacrifices precision for speed — although at times the pace of the movie is incredibly fast — and he has an infallible sense of camera placement. (He’s aided by Keung Kwok Man’s sleek cinematography and Ka-Fai Cheung’s razor-sharp editing.) Even in the midst of the fastest-moving sequences, you’re always able to tell exactly what’s going on.

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In search of my father and my Pakistani roots I went on a journey to rural Sindh, befriending a mysterious landlord who drank heavily and brandished an AK-47

By Aatish Taseer

My parents met in Delhi in March 1980. My Pakistani father was in India promoting a book he had written on his political mentor, the Pakistani leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. My mother, a young Indian journalist, was sent to interview him.

Their affair began that evening. My father took my mother’s number, they had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and for a little over a week they disappeared together.

My parents met at a time when they had both become politically involved in their respective countries. The state of emergency that Mrs Gandhi declared in 1975 had come and gone—she had returned to power and the terrorism in Punjab that would take her life was about to begin.

In Pakistan the year before (the same year as the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the great hope of Pakistani democracy, had been hanged. And now, General Zia, the military dictator, was settling into the blackest decade Pakistan would know.

My father had loved Bhutto. He had heard him speak for the first time as a student in London in the 1960s and was moved to his depths. The events of 1979 then ushered in a time both of uncertainty and possibility. Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, had entered politics; Zia had to be fought; and for this man of 36, touched by unusual idealism, his biography of Bhutto became his political entry point.

My parents’ affair lasted little more than a week before my father left for Lahore, where he already had a wife and three small children. A month later, my mother discovered she was pregnant. For a young woman from an old Sikh family to become pregnant out of marriage by a visiting Pakistani was then (and now) an enormous scandal. During the week when she was considering an abortion, my father called unexpectedly from Dubai. She told him what had happened.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” she replied.

My father asked her what could be done to change her mind. She replied that they would at least have to pretend to be married and so they tentatively agreed to continue their relationship for as long as it was possible.

But by 1982 the relationship was over. My mother had begun work as a political journalist in Delhi and my father was fighting Zia in Pakistan. What I heard of him over the next two decades came only from my mother. We followed his progress across the border, through multiple imprisonments in the 1980s, to the restoration of democracy and Benazir Bhutto’s victory in 1988, to the failed governments of the 1990s, and his eventual switch from politics to business.

In 2002, aged 21, I made a journey to Lahore to seek out my father, Salmaan Taseer. For a few years our relationship flourished, then fell apart. The reason for the latest distance between us was an article I wrote in these pages in 2005, after the London bombings. In response, my father wrote me a letter—the first he’d ever written—in which he accused me of prejudice, of lacking even “superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos,” and of blackening his name. That letter was the origin of my book Stranger to History, an account of a journey I made from Istanbul to Pakistan, in the hope of understanding the silence between us. It is a discovery of his faith, his country and the story of our shared but fractured history.

At the end of my journey I was, by chance, together with my father in Lahore on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed. I found to my surprise that the wheels of power in Pakistan had turned once more and my father, who had spent his youth fighting the military, had re-entered politics and was now a minister in General Musharraf’s government. Here was a lesson about life in Pakistan, for the compromises men had to make. But it was not ultimately in the drawing rooms of Lahore or Karachi that I came closest to understanding Pakistani society, but rather in the time I spent with a young feudal landlord, known as the Mango King, in rural Sindh.
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(Submitted by a reader)

By B. R. Gowani

The impact and the reactions caused by the Danny Boyle film Slumdog Millionaire, its Oscar nominations, and consequent winning of eight Academy Awards including 2008’s Best Picture, has been unprecedented in my recent memory. It seems to have evoked praise by just as many people as have blasted it in the way dire poverty in India has been depicted in the movie.

Many of the slum dwellers in Dharavi, Mumbai, where the film is shot have not liked the way their slum has been portrayed. But there may be many who are feeling happy and hopeful that their plight has been communicated to the world and this may hopefully bring some positive change in their lives. In the end, it really doesn’t matter that the conveyor of their plight happens to be a white person and not an Indian. Also, many Muslims are probably glad that, for a change, they are in the spotlight as the victims and not terrorists as the Western media is so fond of portraying them. People impacted by the dreadful poverty depicted in the movie may be somewhat comforted that the world is now seeing the hidden face of India, their India, rather than the utopian depiction romanticized in the media as the up and coming great power only.

It has made the patriots and the nationalists uncomfortable to see their country associated with slums. Actor Amitabh Bachchan criticized the movie: “if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” He also added: “It’s just that the SM idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.” But On BBC Amitabh clarified: “Fact is – some one mentioned the film on my blog. Some expressed opinion for it, some against. And yes, they contained some strong assumptions. I merely put both of them up and invited debate.” In the past, the famous actress Nargis expressed her dislike in the way the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray portrayed poverty in India, especially in his own state of Bengal.

The argument that Boyle is white and therefore the movie received the awards is thought provoking that even in 21st century racism still exists. (The Academy Awards were instituted in 1927, but it was in 2001 that the Academy decided that a black actress should be granted an Oscar. Halle Berry is the only black actress to have received the honor to date.) After the film had received a couple of awards I knew that its fate had been decided, similar to the slum dog being made the millionaire plot of the movie and the union of the female and male protagonists.

Racism takes many forms. One form is insensitivity and indifference, as happened during the red carpet Oscar Award evening with the E-channel reporter who was covering the dresses, designers, and other aspects of the gala event while conducting mini impromptu interviews with the celebrity actors and actresses. When he saw the SM child actors, he mentioned only two actors’ names, and then put an illegible note with the rest of the actors’ names in front of the camera for a few seconds and the camera moved back on the children who were asked a couple of questions in an amusing patronizing manner. This left many viewers upset.

Hollywood has always been a global affair in so far as its films making money from foreign countries and the televised ceremony of Oscars are concerned. However, only recently is it attempting to give some semblance of globalism in recognizing, or even considering, third world countries like India.*

Slumdog Millionaire is not as artistic as a Satyajit Ray movie but if one compares it to a commercial movie, then I think it was a well made movie. Of course, the idea that a slum dweller can become a millionaire is like winning a super lottery plus [probably without even buying a ticket], so utterly unrealistic, but the film overall has the element to keep one glued to the screen; and many of the things shown in the film are realities for the millions of people who live this poverty on a daily basis. But for those slum children who acted in the film and then attended the Oscar ceremony, it really was like winning the lottery (albeit, without their due of the financial success), to have come all the way from Mumbai slums to the glory and glitter of Hollywood.

I hope that the nationalists and the patriots will do something to eliminate this “dirty, underbelly”, now that the movie has exposed it and it has generated such uproar.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

*The cosmetics and related industries were quick to recognize India as a country of 1 billion “al consumers.” This happened in the wake of the new 1990s Indian policy of changing to “market economy.” This set the ball rolling. Suddenly now, the judges of the beauty contests in the West discovered that Indian women were beautiful; and so they began to be crowned Miss Universe and Miss World. So in the end, it is the driving need for profit that drives all decisions on who is beautiful, who wins awards, who is “in” etc.

By Dean Nelson and Barney Henderson

But the reality of life for Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail is far closer to that of the characters they play in the story of love, violent crime and extreme poverty in India.
The child actors’ parents have accused the hit film’s producers of exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai’s most squalid slums.
Slumdog Millionaire has won four Golden Globes and is nominated for 10 Oscars. It is on its way to making hundreds of millions of pounds in box office receipts.
The film’s British director, Danny Boyle, has spoken of how he set up trust funds for Rubina and Azharuddin and paid for their education. But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian domestic servants.
Rubina was paid £500 for a year’s work while Azharuddin received £1,700, according to the children’s parents.
However a spokesman for the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive. They would not disclose the actual sum.
Both children were found places in a local school and receive £20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.
The children received considerably less than the poor Afghan child stars of The Kite Runner, who embarrassed their Hollywood producers when they disclosed that they had been paid £9,000.
Rubina and Azharuddin live a few hundreds yards from each other in a tangle of makeshift shacks alongside Mumbai’s railway tracks at Bandra. Azharuddin is in fact worse off than he was during filming: his family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin with his father, who suffers from tuberculosis.
“There is none of the money left. It was all spent on medicines to help me fight TB,” Azharuddin’s father, Mohammed Ismail, said. “We feel that the kids have been left behind by the film. They have told us there is a trust fund but we know nothing about it and have no guarantees.”
Further down the tracks, an open sewer trickles past the hut that Rubina shares with her parents, older brother and sister. Her father, Rafiq Ali Kureshi, a carpenter, broke his leg during filming and has been out of work since. “I am very happy the movie is doing so well, but it is making so much money and so much fame and the money they paid us is nothing. They should pay more,” he said, wafting away the smoke from a nearby fire. “I have no regrets. I just had no knowledge of what she should have been paid.”
His daughter has been overwhelmed by the glamour of her experience and idolises Freida Pinto, the screen beauty who plays her character as an adult, with whom she attended the Indian premiere of the film last week .“I want to be a star like Freida,” she said. “I am going to ask Danny-uncle (director Boyle) to take me to London and be in more films.”
A Fox Searchlight spokesman said: “The welfare of Azhar and Rubnia has always been a top priority for everyone involved with Slumdog Millionaire.
“A plan has been in place for over 12 months to ensure that their experience working on Slumdog Millionaire would be of long term benefit. For 30 days work, the children were paid three times the average local annual adult salary. Last year after completing filming, they were enrolled in school for the first time and a fund was established for their future welfare, which they will receive if they are still in school when they turn 18.
“Due to the exposure and potential jeopardy created by the unwarranted press attention, we are looking into additional measures to protect Azhar and Rubina and their families. We are extremely proud of this film, and proud of the way our child actors have been treated.”
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