The little actors, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail from the Oscar winning movie Slumdog Millionaire, feel betrayed as they still haven’t got anything that they were promised by the film. They were told they will be given apartments, money and a trust that would be turned over to them when they finished school. They were also paid less than $3000 for their roles in a movie that made hundreds of millions.
For the Oscars, they were taken from Mumbai to L.A. and they also spent a few days in Disneyland. They must have thought that their lives had turned around. After six weeks they still haven’t heard from their producer. They haven’t visited them or given them a call.
Director Danny Boyle made a lot of public promises about giving them new homes, education and money. They say that the monthly allowance that was promised to the children, stopped even before the Oscars.
Azharuddin Ismail lives under a tarp, his father has tuberculosis and may die anytime while his mother is blind in one eye. Rubina, 9, lives in a tin shack with an open gutter running in front of the shack.
It is a pity that these children were shown heaven and had it snatched away from them. Having seen all the glamour on the red carpet, they cant even return to a home with 4 solid walls and running water. Now that this story is out in the news, hopefully Danny Boyle will give them at least some cheap apartment so that they can live decently.
