Year on, slum kids are millionaires

MUMBAI: On January 11 last year, a Danny Boyle film shot in the dregs of this city with a few local child actors won four Golden Globes and made history. Slumdog Millionaire went on to win eight of the 10 nominations it got at the Oscars and changed the life of six little children forever.
One year on, while the well-to-do children from Mumbai who played the middle Salim, Jamal and Latika are honing their talent and attending auditions, even failing and becoming frustrated, it is the children of the slums — Rubina Ali and Azhar Ismail — who’ve attained a rare level of comfort, making £1,000 a day for shooting a film and earning Rs 1 crore by way of royalty for a book they never wrote.
The impish Ayush Khedekar, the little Jamal who jumped into a cesspool and became immortal, is working in fits and starts. Unlike last January, when the child was hard pressed to squeeze in five-minute media interviews past midnight, this year he’s breathing easy, says dad Mahesh.
Tanay Chheda, the middle Jamal who had Taare Zameen Par to his credit before he went international, has since done a German version of Harry Potter. His acting apparently has softened the hard-nosed Germans so much that they may actually subtitle the film and release it in other countries, something Tanay’s mother Tejal says they never do.
Although he is yet to find an “author-backed role” and dislikes having to audition after proving himself, Tanay is lucky for having retained a foothold in Bollywood by playing the young Shah Rukh in Karan Johar’s My Name Is Khan. “He had auditioned for the role much before Slumdog but Karan Johar insisted he wanted him after Slumdog’s success,” says Tejal, who will not hire a professional manager lest he overbook her son. Tanay left Campion School to join Dhirubhai Ambani International and it would not do to compromise his schoolwork.