|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
March 2009
THEY are the same small children wearing the same smart outfits they donned for the Oscars just last Sunday. But just one week later, little Slumdog stars Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali are a world away from the Hollywood glitz—back in the filth of the shanty town they know as home. This evening, instead of chatting with Angelina Jolie, they’ll be jumping over the open sewers that run through their streets to get water from the communal tap that serves hundreds of families in the slum Bandra suburb of Mumbai.
IN the heart of the Indian jungle, someone has built a war memorial, a stepped cement pyramid rising out of the red dirt. The names of three residents of the village of Pedda Korma are etched into it. They are not soldiers or police, but martyrs of the Maoist Naxal insurgency. Kursam Lakhi and Sukki Modiyam, raped and killed by the police and Salwa Judum militia on 6 February 2005; Comrade Korsa Bhima, martyred in the March 2007 attack on Rani Bodli, when 55 policemen died. "The martyrdom will not be in vain," it proclaims. "Long live the people's liberation guerrilla army."
________________________________________________________ |
|
||
