Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Complete index of Jon Kennedy's Jonal articles

Jon Kennedy's latest book is The Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, now in stores, from Adams Media, F&W Publications. From May 9, 2007 through July 2, 2008 his blog entries or "Jonals" were articles inspired by readings in Lewis's work that didn't fit into the book. Click here for a list of all articles in the C.S. Lewis Overflow series. The book is available for purchase in support of the Liberty Museum in Nanty Glo and is also available on Amazon.

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A slumdog's lament

Jonal entry 1098 | April 22 2009

A Home Page country acquaintance recommended watching Slumdog Millionaire, so I did so over the weekend. Last year's most honored movie, it is the story of a young Muslim boy from the slums of Mumbai, India (formerly called Bombay), who goes from abject poverty to great wealth through a television quiz show but, more importantly, turns out to be a protagonist of "heroic virtue" but which the movie's writers and producers would probably prefer you think of as having "great love," for his main strength is also that. This is not a movie review but a discussion of some questions and reflections the movie raised, but still, if you think you may want to see the video in the future and you would rather not know key plot points in a movie before you see it, you might want to hold off reading further until you've had that chance. I have never minded knowing plot points in advance; to me, much of the fun of seeing a movie is seeing how the things I've heard or read about it are brought about in the story's unfolding, but I gather my way of thinking on this is a minority view.

This is, in classical terms, a retelling of the Cain and Abel story of the book of Genesis, of two brothers, one turning against God and the other turning to Him, except that in the movie, and most reworkings of that basic plotline (East of Eden, for example), here the "good" brother lives happily ever after at the end where the other does not, when in Genesis that is reversed. Cain, the God-renouncing brother, kills Abel and lives on to gloat about it into ripe old age. God's view of "living happily ever after" differs from the view of most other authors.

It having been over a decade since I'd been regularly writing about movies, I made some stupid first-impression comments about this one with another acquaintance who had also seen it. I said, "I was surprised that they would do an Indian movie about a Muslim character in such a situation rather than a Hindu," thinking only of the great majority of the religious population of that country being Hindu. I also said I was surprised that the older brother turned out to be as bad as he did, based on his childhood character traits. But of course (at least from the little I know of Hinduism) "slumdogs" (which apparently is an Indian term for people like these brothers and their girl friend, who have to eke out a living on the garbage dumps) are not even considered "characters" in the Hindu caste system; such people—who are regarded as "untouchable"—would probably never be cast in a heroic treatment in a Hindu story. It's because of such mistreatment that most Muslim converts and also Christian converts in India are from the lower castes. And on the other point there were strong signals of the elder brother's selfish and materialistic character early in the plot which I hadn't processed when I made my snap judgment, beginning with his telling the younger brother not to invite a poor lonely little girl into their leanto to get out of the monsoon rains. And to the younger brother's credit, he does so anyway.

It turned out to be a film well worth watching, but I would have watched it just to see how India looks in it compared with my own, even-lower-budget previous films of India. (Click here. Note that there are four segments of the India "movie"; scroll down the page for the others). But an unexpected bonus of watching it was the insight it gave into the call centers that have made India famous to an even broader cross-section of Americans. Call centers are just one form of "offshore out-sourcing" that most large American companies have been using in recent years. In fact, when you drive through your local fast food restaurant, you may be placing your order to a call center, which may be in India; the people there take the order and enter it in a computer which makes it almost instantaneously appear on a computer screen in your local eatery so your order may be filled by the time you drive to the next window. The high tech company I worked for before my retirement last year has a whole division now working in India (as well as others in places like Ireland and Taiwan).

A few days ago, quite coincidentally, a friend at my gym gave me an item from the New York Times about one of the newest trends in offshore out-sourcing: news reporting. According to this piece, a weekly newspaper in Pasadena, California, has workers in India monitoring the meetings of the city council (which are made public over the Internet), which they then write up as council reports. They also rewrite local (Pasadena) press releases, compile a weekly calendar of community events, and even do local interviews (via telephone) to compile the content of a Southern California newspaper. The publisher fired his Pasadena staff members making $600 to $800 each per week, and pays the Indian workers $7.50 for 1,000 words submitted. Even twenty years ago the "cheapest" freelance writing markets in the United States paid a penny a word ($100 per thousand). But even the slowest writers schooled in English (as most Indians are) can write a thousand or even several thousand words of news copy a day, and compared with slumdog standards, $7.50 a day is good money.

In 1993, when I was executive editor of the Times Newspaper Group of San Jose, I spent a month in Altoona because my brothers and I thought our mother, who was living there, was dying (and she did die, a few days after I started the drive back home to California, which news caught up with me in Albuquerque). But I didn't take any time off work for my month in Altoona; I worked from there using email and file transfer protocol to edit, and lay out using a publications layout program, all of our newspapers for the month, without missing or being late on any deadlines. It was because of that that I became inspired to create a web site (even though websites hardly existed that early in Internet history) for my old home town from 2700 miles away from it. It was, if I must say, somewhat visionary. I got much more mail (electronically) within a couple of months of starting the Nanty Glo Home Page, and all of it from local and former residents of Blacklick Valley, than I did via postal mail in my whole tenure of several years as editor of the Nanty Glo Journal. It was an experiment to see if it's really feasible to do such a local enterprise from anywhere in the world, and in that it proved successful.

But, strangely, it seems to be a vision that appealed to the older generation, not much below my age and to people on up the longevity chart, but less so the younger generations. As older participants in the Home Page have been dying off, they don't seem to be being replaced by new, younger ones. Maybe it has something to do with technical or even language literacy. Or it may be that we oldtimers love a Nanty Glo and Blacklick Valley that anyone born since, say, 1960, has never known. Or it may be something else.

I wonder.

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

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