life in India

                I have learned that life in India isn’t always easy.  Some parts of the country are really poor, and people will do almost anything to make some money.  Some people will make children work for them, basically like a slave.  Other children might find jobs for themselves.  They might work in carpet-making factories, or even on plantations.  In the movie Slumdog Millionaire, one of the boys stands outside of one of their only outhouses and collects money when someone comes to use it.  Some people don’t even use the outhouse. Maybe this is because there are very little of them.  One in a thousand people actually do use the outhouses.

India is a very poor country with a very large population of 1.21 billion people.  This country has the second largest population in the world.  It is also one of the poorest.  Forty to eighty percent of the population is below the poverty line.  People have to try to make money in any way that they can, sometimes they even sell their family members to work for someone.  Because of its population and amount of poverty, most of the population lives in slums.  Slums are groups of houses in a very bad condition with really poor sanitation.  Life in the slums is probably very crowded because over one million people live in Dharavi, which is the largest slum in Asia.  Eighteen thousand people are crowded into one acre of this slum.

India has a major problem with human trafficking.  Human trafficking is forcing people from their homes and making those people work for them.  Today, about 2.5 million people around the world are forced into slavery.  People trying to make money will get children to work for them so they can make money without actually working.  In India, there are 11.2 million children working in India, whether they’re being forced to work or not.  Children anywhere from ages five to fourteen are currently working.

In India, they have a Hindi film industry.  This industry produces over two thousand films a year.  In America, we only make about one thousand films or less a year.  They call their film industry Bollywood.  They came up with this name by combining Hollywood and Bombay.  Their films are a major source of entertainment with an audience of over three billion people.  Hindi, Urdu, and English are the most commonly used languages in the Hindi film industry.

I think that the movie Slumdog Millionaire did accurately show how life in India really is today.  It showed what people have to do in order to make some money and how they continue to live their lives every day.  I think that, like the boy in the movie, people growing up in India could learn a lot of things without having to go to school.  According to the movie, the children living there encounter a lot of experiences in their lives every day that teaches them important things along the way of their everyday lives.  They might not think some of the things they face are important, but maybe someday they will be.