Fifteen years ago, the movie's class-war theme -- the swells in their tuxedoes lounging amid the Titanic's creamy classical splendor, versus the lugs in steerage, led by Leonardo DiCaprio's penniless rapscallion bohemian Jack -- seemed a fairly standard old-movie trope.

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Or was it karma, punishment for the anonymous and penniless way that India's greatest hockey player ever, Dhyan Chand, was allowed to die?

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But his rival and, some would argue, intellectual superior, Nikola Tesla , spent his last years feeding pigeons outside New York's Public Library, and died nearly penniless.

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It is a bizarre occasion, a million miles and over a century away from Manet's time, when Monet and Van Gogh were penniless and their art rejected, and the great Cezanne worked in glorious isolation.

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It's left some, like Ariel Jimenez(ph), nearly penniless their first weeks here.

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