The Untouchables Netflix

[Yogprasad Moneta]

Thisis just one of the questions that Balram Halwai, a poor, village-bred Indian boy and the central character of the movie The White Tiger, asks himself as he works as a chauffeur to a rich businessman in Delhi.

The movie, newly released on Netflix, is an adaptation of the Booker Prize- winning debut novel of the same name by Indian author Aravind Adiga. Produced by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and directed by Ramin Bahrani, the film offers a grim tale of corruption and betrayal, examining the complex dynamics of the employer-servant relationships in India while delving into the country's stark rich-poor divide and its class and caste issues.

"The greatest thing to come out of this country ... is the Rooster Coop. The roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers ... They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country."

Mohammed Wajihuddin says he is ok with the rooster coop comparison. "Having been born into a poor but large family, I could relate a lot with the film's story," says Wajihuddin, senior assistant editor at The Times of India in Mumbai. "The poor have few choices to make about their careers. They mostly swim with the tide."

Even if you can beat the odds, your own family's expectations can be unrealistic and weigh on you heavily. Wajihuddin explains how his father, a schoolteacher, had expected him to take up a career in medicine or become a bureaucrat even though he wasn't interested in those jobs. "In the movie, Balram's grandmother is very harsh with him when he fails to send back money to his family, since there were many mouths to feed. It reminded me of how my own father was unhappy when I could send him only Rs 10,000 [$137] for my sister's wedding. I had saved this money from my meager salary while starting out as a journalist two decades ago. I could relate to Balram's anxiety at not being able to do much for his family back home."

Not everyone feels the rooster coop image was an apt representation. Vaishali Shadangule, 42, founder of the fashion house Vaishali.S, left her hometown of Vidisha, about 500 miles from Mumbai, as a 17-year-old, with only the clothes on her back and the burning need to escape the limitations of a small town. Traveling ticketless on the train out of her hometown and headed for the northern Indian city of Bhopal, she had no money and no plan either.

"Living in a small town, you lack a certain exposure, which makes you feel alien in the city," she says. In this respect, she identifies with Balram's struggle. She wanted to make it big as a fashion designer but had to do many odd jobs at first when she arrived in Bhopal and later moved to Mumbai, working as an office assistant and gym instructor to make ends meet. She eventually started her own retail store, but it took her ten years of hard work before she could save money to study fashion formally. She put herself through college, funding a postgraduate course in fashion in Milan from her earnings.

"I started with nothing, and yet, I don't remember being resentful of anyone," she says. "Eventually, I think my small-town roots helped me focus on the people involved in the fashion industry who are often not seen or heard. It helped me value people more."

The movie's portrayal of the cycle of intergenerational and systematic poverty is engrossing and haunting, says Abraham George, author of India Untouched: The Forgotten Face of Rural Poverty. He's also the founder of the George Foundation (now Shanti Bhavan), a nonprofit that has educated over 400 underprivileged children in the last 23 years, roughly half of them from rural villages.

While education is often the key to raising yourself from poverty and verbal abuse, (such as the kind that Balram suffered from his employer's family), that's not true for everyone, he says. Even with a good education, poor women in particular have difficulty finding well-paying positions that wield authority and are often hindered by the bias against hiring women in general.

The movie also comments on the caste system in India, an ancient and rigid code of social division typically based on the occupations that people once performed. "Dalits [an umbrella term for people belonging to the lowest castes in India, called "untouchables"] face even greater hurdles," says George.

When Neethipudi's father wanted to buy an apartment in an upscale housing society in his city, the property owners politely told him "unfortunately, we do not sell homes to people from your community." They were referring to his status as a Dalit.

"Because my father was an engineer and had a respectable job, the casteism was polite," says Neethipudi. "But if a family member back in our native village ever tried to engage with dominant caste landlords in such equal terms or attempted to demand equal access to opportunities and resources, consequences could range from loss of employment as farm labor, social ostracization, or even physical violence. And that is the delicate reality of caste even in 21st century India."

For thousands of years in India, citizens have been organized by a strict caste system and expected to live, work, and marry within the class they were born into. In the top castes are priests and teachers, and at the bottom are menial laborers. Below them, there's the poorest of the poor, the Dalits, once called "the untouchables."

Today India's caste system is gradually falling out of use, but there are still some 200 million Dalits in India, families who have been living in extreme poverty for generations and have practically no way out. Generational poverty is a huge problem everywhere, including the United States, but this is one of the starkest examples of it in the world.

In 1997 an Indian American businessman had a radical idea about how to fight generational poverty and founded a special school in India to make it happen. It's called Shanti Bhavan, and it's the subject of a new Netflix documentary called Daughters of Destiny, which premiers Friday.

And here's the thing: This radical intervention works. Some 97 percent of Shanti Bhavan students graduate from high school, and 98 percent go on to graduate from college. Shanti Bhavan grads are now working at places like Amazon, Mercedez Benz, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan. For a group of kids destined to spend their lives in extreme poverty, that's huge.

"The most important statistic, however," says Ajit George, Shanti Bhavan's director of operations. "Is that all Shanti Bhavan graduates give back 20 to 50 percent of their salary to their families, communities, and other children in need. Their achievements are impacting others on a tremendous scale."

We were especially psyched about this film because we've been fans of Shanti Bhavan for a while now. Last year Glamour visited the school to profile Keerthi, an amazing young girl whose life was changed when she got into Shanti Bhavan. Keerthi's education was partly funded by She's the First, a partner of Glamour's philanthropic initiative, The Girl Project.

Daughters of Destiny, directed by award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth, tells the stories of five students who are working to break out of the poverty trap with the help of Shanti Bhavan and shares the amazing tale of the man who started the school and has worked tirelessly to keep it running.

For many years systems of intervention focused on basic literacy as an almost arbitrary benchmark or end goal without questioning what basic literacy could actually do for someone in poverty. Shanti Bhavan looked at the results of decades of basic literacy and found that many of its recipients ended up back in poverty once the program ended. In fact, many of the parents of the children of Shanti Bhavan went through some form of a basic literacy program, or primary and secondary education, and yet went straight back into poverty once their schooling ended.

Our model is a 17-year intervention, from pre-K through college. Until they complete twelfth grade, our students live in our beautiful campus where they receive clothing, meals, health care, and all the support of a stable home. After twelfth grade we continue to provide guidance and financial support as they pursue college educations and attain their first job.

To that end, we are currently raising funds for a second Shanti Bhavan school, which we will begin construction on in 2018. A second school doubles our immediate impact, but the long-term effect those children will have on the region is immeasurable. This is how you break the cycle of poverty.

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