I chose to take a look at the movie Slumdog Millionaire to compare what teens deal with growing up in the slums of India compared to teens growing up in the United States.
To begin my first point, a quote I took form Bordo’s article Never Just Pictures states that “Children in this culture grow up knowing that you can never be thin enough and that being fat is one of the worst things one can be” (445). I felt that this quote relates to one huge difference between growing up in the slums of Mumbai compared to growing up in the United States. The quote shows how here in the United States, teens starve themselves on purpose to lose weight and worry about eating too much so they can try to look better. But after watching the movie Slumdog Millionaire you see that there are no eating disorders, there is just malnutrition. People there worry about being too skinny and are fighting to get food to ease the pain of hunger.
Next, I thought that it would be interesting to compare the differences between what teens do on a daily basis when growing up in the United States or in the slums of India. First, when you are a teen in the United States, that is usually when most people get their first job, you are going to school, and having fun with your friends. As shown in the movie, there are actually a lot of similarities, only they aren’t to the same extent. For a teen in the slums, most don’t have a job. In order to get money, they go around begging and if they don’t get money they will steal what they need to buy. As far as schooling goes, Teens attend school, but there are many more illiterate adolescents in India than there are in the United States because they don’t have all the same laws for children attending school until a certain age. And last, teen in India make time to run around with their peers and play games just the same as those in the U.S.
Last, in Tolman’s article, Getting Beyond “It Just Happened,” Tolman makes different points about how girls should be sexually mature before giving up their virginity and being sexually active. Growing up in the United States, being a teen girl, you have the right to have sex with who you want, choose when you are ready to start having sex, and you also have the right to say “No” to having sex, and if someone takes advantage of those rights, they are punished. But in other parts of the world, there are people who kidnap girls and force them to have sex and are considered “property” and are sold as sex slaves and don’t get to chose when to have sex; so if these girls don’t feel that they are sexually mature, then it to bad so sad for them. An example in this movie of a girl being taken advantage of is Latika. Latika was taken at a young age by bad guys and she grew up being forced to dance for money. Also in the movie, she was forced to have sex with Salim in order to save the life of her loved one, Jamal. So as you can see, in other parts of the world, women are denied certain rights and men have a stronger influence over women.
Works Cited
Bordo, Susan. Twilight Zones: the Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J.
Berkeley: University of California, 1997. Print.
Slumdog Millionaire. Dir. Danny Boyle. Prod. Christian Colson. By Simon Beaufoy.
Perf. Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor, and Irrfan Khan. Fox
Searchlight Pictures, 2008.
Tolman, Deborah L. Getting Beyond "It Just Happened" 20 Aug. 1999.
