Salaam Bombay!

Salaam Bombay! is an award winning Indian film from 1988. It was nominated for Best Foreign film at the Academy Awards. This film is about a boy, who struggles to maintain a life in the streets of Bombay. This boy was abandoned by his mother at a circus. After breaking his brother’s motorbike, he is told not to come home unless he has 500 rupees. Krishna gets a job with the circus in order to get the 500 rupees. After coming back from an errand, he sees the circus has packed up and traveled somewhere else. He then decides to use his last few rupees to travel to Bombay. This brings him to the life of an average street child living in Bombay. He is now living with pimps, street hustlers, drug addicts, and prostitutes. Where he has to fend for himself in order to survive as he finds out saving money in his surroundings will be incredibly hard to do.
The first thing I noticed about this film was its music. The music in the film was incredibly charming and it gave the film its own personality. I enjoyed the story and liked the way it ended even more. Over the course of the film he works odd jobs to feed himselg. The boy eventually makes the 500 rupees but it gets stolen by his junkie friend who he helped. He gets taken in by the police and but into a juvenile detention center after they apprehended him for breaking into an older man’s house to steal his things. He then escapes and is brought back into the world he just was in. In the film he falls in love with a young prostitute. At the very end, he stabs her pimp in the back and runs away with her. The way the film ends with the boy crying was very powerful. The fact that he doesn’t have the 500 rupees or any family or hope is very touching. It doesn’t welt that he could be wanted for stabbing the pimp. I liked how it didn’t have a happy ending but a more realistic one. The fact that nothing was really settled in the end made me appreciate what the film was all about.
A major theme in this film is survival. Krishna, the central character, spends the entire time in this film trying to survive admist all the drug pushers and street hustlers. He runs into many shady people in Bombay. Surviving in the streets of Bombay is not easy and Krishna learns that the hard way. The theme of survival can also apply to the character of Sola Saal, the young prostitute, who is treated very poorly by her pimp. It is not until the very end until she is saved from him by Krishna. Her life should be better from that point on, but Krishna’s survival is still up in the air.
The dedication at the end of the film to the children on the streets of Bombay was also a nice touch. There are probably many kids outthere who are in a similar situation that main character of this film was in. It was a very realistic film and things happen so natually. The children in the film, especially the main character, were very good actors. That’s why I felt it flowed so natually. I never once thought these were child actors. The film was very well made, acted, and directed. The film also feels like a documentary at the times probably due to its shots of Bombay. It feels like we are capturing something in reality at times. It was somewhat slow moving at times but the story was good and the ending made it worthwile.