SIDDHARTH LINKS CHILD LABOR WITH HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Bollywood idealizes the high life of India. Not so Siddharth, directed by Richie Mehta. The film is a slice of life of the underclass in India. The story is about Mehendra Saini (played by Rajesh Tailang), who sends his 12-year-old son Siddharth from Delhi to work for a month in a factory run by his brother’s friend in upper Punjab. His earnings will help the family, as Mehendra’s occupation is to repair zippers, and the factory has little business for him. When the month ends, Mehendra and his wife Suman (Tannishtha Chatterjee) expect Siddharth to return to celebrate the Diwali festival of lights (late October). But the boy does not return. His brother Pinky (Khushi Mathur) is cavalier about the matter at first, but when Mehendra finally gets the telephone number of the factory manager, the story is that his son ran off, something that his brother knew two weeks earlier. Mehendra reports the matter to the police, which chastise him for sending his son for child labor, but they are unable to help him because he has no photograph of his son to circulate. Next, Mehendra goes to the factory, where the boy’s roommate clarifies that he went out for food alone one day but never returned, and suggests they he might have his eyes poked out and be forced to beg on the street for the benefit of a captor. He also hints that Siddharth might be in a town that few ever heard of until one of his customers on the street uses her cellphone to search for the name and finds that the place is outside Mumbai. Helped by friends and a kind employer, he get funds to go to Mumbai. A taxi takes him to the place where wayward boys are housed by a charitable organization, but there is no clue about his son. At one point, he mistakes a boy for his son and thus realizes that even he has no recollection of what his son would look like if he saw him. A reviewer should not reveal the ending—whether the boy was found—but can report that Siddharth has been nominated by the Political Film Society as best film exposé regarding the plight of the poor and best film on human rights dealing with issues of child labor and human trafficking. MH