slumdog millionaire

All of us navigate through life via the experience we have had - there is no other way. Despite our experience, there are things that are hard fact even though we have not met and known it as such. On rare exceptions we get a life-line, a moment of deus ex-machina, a moment of tangible grace.
It just so happens that the miraculous run of Jamal was due to the unlikely pairing of his life experience with the questions being asked by Prem, host of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. But it is more than this. When Jamal is asked the cricket question for 10 million rupees, Jamal does not know the answer. But he does know the character of human beings. Especially the character of the Millionaire host Prem, a slumdog made good.
Jamal uses his life-line, bettering his chances to 50/50, and in a move of savvy resilience refuses the hand of the slumdog, who with seeming mercy offers the answer B. to Jamal in the bathroom at a station break. Jamal knows that powerful slumdogs tend to eat their own, and to the astonishment of Prem, picks D. In so doing elicits the anger of Prem who accuses Jamal of cheating, but is more so suffering from jealousy of being one-uped. Jamal is taken off the set and tortured by thugs before being released to play. For the nation of India is waiting on their slumdog hero, and will certainly not tolerate the hero gone missing.
The 20 million rupee question comes from The Three Musketeers, a chapter in the life of Jamal. Who is the third musketeer? This is an answer Jamal would have known had he not been skipping school as a boy. Jamal's phone-a-friend life-line fails. He knows Porthos and Athos, two of the musketeers, and two of the answers, names that he and his brother Salim gave to themselves as boys. Again it is a 50/50 chance.
One evening as little orphan boys, Jamal and Salim shelter in a train car from the driving rain. Jamal spots a forlorn girl and intends to invite her to the box-car at the protest of Salim. Jamal counters that she is their third musketeer as they seek to survive in the squalor of Mumbai's Garib Nagar (poor district).
Aramis, the third musketeer, is followed by luck and climbs to power, dependent on gold from wealthhy mistresses to survive. And yet, Aramis holds very firmly to the sacred concept of friendship. Latika is Aramis. Does Jamal know this? Perhaps Jamal knew the story better than we know. Perhaps he knew d'Artagnan was not one of the musketeers and therefore could not be the answer. Perhaps he knew Latika's story was not d'Artagnan's story. Perhaps it was a process of elimination. Perhaps it was written.

We Tend to Those Between

Merry Christmas all ...

Christmas Poem ‘08

The candle-lit services are over, packages have been opened –
As is custom on this side of the family
Six hours more dawn will appear lighting up the mountain peaks
Beaver Mountain (now called by an Anglo name), the highest of them all
Will light up first – on clear mornings it looms brilliant pink
Before it fades to sustainable hue
It is the dark hours of Christmas morning, and I wonder this silent holy eve
What went on for one and a half millennia in this Valley
Before the name of Christ arrived on the lips of white skinned settlers
And crosses were erected
On a continent with the oldest living tree named Methuselah
A name from the stories of men who kept written records
Arapaho named the rocks above that have been re-named
Meeker, Longs, Hallet, and Washington
As if nothing was before
And all that is was ferried across the Atlantic
As so many Jews in canoes - as told in the etchings of the golden plates that Joseph Smith read
We sing Joy to the World, O’ Little Town of Bethlehem and Hark the Herald Angels
And this is good
But yet I hear the voice of Black Elk
Whose visions matched the Black Robes good-news tale
Here amidst the sage and sparkling streams filled with native cutthroat trout
Juniper holy as Olive trees, Ponderosa mighty as Lebanon cedars
All growing by the rain, twisted by the wind
Under the same bright stars, rising-setting sun
And cosmic laws that make it all go round
Was Christ the Word already here flickering in the sky
Winking in the water
Alive in the heart of man made alive through the Spirit
God alone lights the candles and snuffs them out -
At the beginning and the end
And we tend to those between

I wear camel hair jackets with t-shirts, drink out of a sigg bottle when I'm on the go, beleive advocating for fresh water wells in Africa/Latin America/India is good action ... and like to throw frisbee with my friends and dog.