Is this nothing but a slumdog?

We've just seen the film Slumdog Millionaire. It is an epic. It has outstanding performances. It is shot with in-your-face colours and compositions. It will clean-up at the Oscars. But I would have thought twice, if I had known what it was like.

 

Must life be like this? Incredibly cruel. Selfish to the core. Totally driven by money. Them and us, rich and poor. All for the sake of....

 

In the end love won over everything, but at what price? OK, it is only a story, it is only a film; but I'm naive enough to think that life is like that in places all around the world.

 

I will clap and cheer with everyone, when the director and actor gets their gongs, but I hope they will have collecting boxes for the heroes that have survived, or are at the moment surviving, what this film portrays in angonising detail.

In the beginning ...

How many times have we said that?
But is this the time?

The time to hang-up our prejudices.
Time to start anew?

Time to fix what's broken
time to grab a pew.

And when we find that time
will we give it the time it's due?

Time to once more see a smile
upon their timeless faces.

Time to accept and renew
without calling in anytime dues.

So who's saying time on time?
Not you or you. Not this time.

He eats like us, he talks like us.....

Following on from my earlier email, the BBC News is here showing a clip of President-Elect Obama eating a burger in amongst the other diners.

What impressed me was his willingness to be among the people; he even joked that he was left alone with his minder when he was far happier mixing it with everyone else.

That's unusual, normally the great and the good pose for a photo call and then disappear; not this Pres.

Can't wait for Jan 20; talking of which:

Why is the US the only country that waits so long from electing a new administration to them taking over? Here in the UK we do it the very next day and I think that is pretty much the same throughout the world.

So, Mr. President-Elect, on taking office please change the handover period to the next day, or, if you guys need a bit more time, call it a week, not the present drawn-out system. In the time it's taken to bring in President Obama, we've had a war, if anyone has noticed.

Mr. President-Elect we need you NOW!

I am crying for the future

because of Barack Obama.

 

I was given his book, Dreams From My Father, for Christmas and I am reading, and pinching myself, that this man is the President-Elect of America.

 

I am hardly into the book and my heart is bursting with respect for a man who is not yet a teenager but has tasted life that most of us can only look at from a distance.

 

Because we know where he is now, it only makes us more excited about the future.

 

When he sees injustice, he has lived it.

 

When he talks about hope, he has needed it.

 

In the book, the man in the magazine photo many years ago, that looked like the blood had been drained from him, was a black man wanting to be a white man; but the result was wrong, the hope was gone.

 

And now the future is his to share with us all.

 

I cry because of the great expectations, the great destiny within him and, therefore within us all.

 

It  could be the happiest new year ever!