Is Slumdog Millionaire Really Worth Seeing?

What is so great about Slumdog Millionaire?

Does it embrace the stereotypical lens of poverty, filth, injustice, and misery that Westerners like to see India through?

Is it a typical crowd-pleaser Masala Hindi movie, with ubiquitous song and dance sequences, car chases, bad and corrupt police, parents killed when children were small, boys become gangsters, girl ends up in prostitution, good winning over evil in the end formula guaranteed to make zillions at the box office?

Or is it a serious attempt to shock people to the truth that these poverty, filth, injustice, and misery are not going away even as India grows to take its rightful place among the nations of the world?

Are the makers of this film doing India a service by showing something Indian filmmakers could never show? 

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Background of Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire, the 2008 British drama film directed by Danny Boyle has won lots of prestigious awards like the Critics’ Choice Awards, four Golden Globe and seven Bafta Awards as well as being nominated for ten Oscars. But, the film has had a very poor reception in India.

Many Indian critics have not been enthusiastic about the film and it’s portrayal of poverty and life in Mumbai. The film is based on Q and A (2005) written by Vikas Swarup, who is currently India’s Deputy High Commissioner to South Africa. The director is Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting fame and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy are British. The co-director Loveleen Tandon is an Indian from Delhi. The superb actors are also from a mixed background. 

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British Gujarati Dev Patel, who played Muslim Anwar Kharral in the Teen soap Skins, shines again as Muslim Jamal Malik. Irrfan Khan from a Nawab family in Jaipur is the police officer interrogating Jamal Malik. The beautiful Freida Pinto, a Mangalorean Catholic plays Latika. Anil Kapoor from Mumbai plays Prem Kumar, the host of the Indian version of the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The music of Allah Rakkha Rahman, the Hindu born Sufi from Chennai does justice to his fame (100 million records sold) and to the film.



The Plot of Slumdog Millionaire


A police inspector (Irrfan Khan) interrogates Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a former street child from the Dharavi slums of Mumbai, India by using clumsy third-degree methods. Jamal is a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire hosted by Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor). Jamal has made it to the final question, scheduled for the next day, but the show master bribes the police into accusing Jamal of cheating. He is a lowly chaiwallah or tea-boy, without any education, and cannot know all the answers. 

They also think that he could not have gone up to the last question out of sheer luck. Jamal’s tempestuous life unfolds, and these events give him clues to the questions. In the end, the main baddies get killed, Jamal wins 20 million Rupees (a humungous sum of money anywhere), Jamal finds his childhood lover Latika and they are reunited.

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Significance of Slumdog Millionaire

• Slumdog Millionaire is not a pleasant feelgood orgy of visual delights. 
• Neither is it an epic like Devdas (any version). 
• There is no subtle poetry of underlying emotions as in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). 
• It also doesn’t look like becoming a Sholay (1975) in India. 

The director Boyle says that the 1975 blockbuster Deewar starring India’s iconic filmstar Amitabh Bachan was an inspiration for this film. Slumdog Millionaire is a very different and disturbing film, especially for Indians. Slumdog Millionaire is targeted at the channelchanger loving MTV generation. The overuse of incessant flashbacks is annoying and confuses. The portrayal of evil, misery, squalor and poverty is more gruesome than in contemporary or old Indian films like Deewar (1975). The rot in society is exposed in all ugliness. The India police are shown as inefficient and corrupt, but the local thana or police station is no Guantanamo either.

Like many movies, the screen version changes everything from character relationships to many of the major dramatic incidents. 

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But, what it succeeds brilliantly is in archetypal representation. 

• The lovers Jamal and Latika believe in kismat or destiny, and they are eventually reunited. 
• The elder brother Salim chooses the dark side like Darth Vader and achieves worldly success. He eventually recognizes his mistakes and atones by eliminating the major obstacle from the path of the lovers and sacrifices his own life in the process. 
• Jamal (a Muslim boy) is portrayed as the virtuous Rama from Hindu mythology. Jamal is not the goody goody simpleton Chance the Gardener (Being There 1979). He practises the ways of the world and takes unwitting people for a ride to make a living, but he is naturally yet effortlessly ethical and embodies some higher ideal, dharma. 

Indian Reactions to Slumdog Millionaire

“If SM projects India as Third World dirty under belly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky under belly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. It’s just that the SM idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a Westerner, gets creative Globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.” Says Amitabh Bachan on his blog.

The Hindustan Times in India dished out five stars out of five, eulogising it as a "masterwork of technical bravura, adorned with inspired ensemble performances and directed with astonishing empathy." 

The Times of India also gave 4.5 stars, brushing aside questions about whether it was a realistic portrayal of slum life. It calls SM, "just a piece of riveting cinema." "Forget the Us versus Them debate. Just go for the pure cinema experience," the newspaper writes.
"'Slumdog' is big but it is essentially a Hollywood film," the general manager for marketing and sales, PVR Cinemas, in Mumbai's Juhu district, Joydeep Ghoshroy, was quoted as saying in the Hindustan Times.
“Had this film been made by an Indian director, it would’ve been trashed as a rotting old hat, which literally stands out only because of its stench, but since the man making it happens to be from the West, we’re all left celebrating the emperor’s new clothes.” Says Arindam Chaudhuri, Editor-in-chief, The Sunday Indian.

An outsider view often gives new insights. The secret of India’s astonishing diversity is that in its long history India has always assimilated outsider views. OutDia becomes India. Ironically, the very language many Indians use to lambast Slumdog Millionaire is English, originally an outsider language.

India Grasping the Moon by Chandrayaan Moon Mission

With the launch of Chandrayaan 1, India has made clear her intention of being recognized as a modern 21^st century spacefaring civilisation. 

The emphasis on the scientific and research aspects of India’s first moon mission launch are not out of sync with the Indian national character and historical heritage. 

India has given birth to four major religions of the world, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Ignoring hotheaded fundamentalists, these religions generally do not have any inherent conflict with science or scientific reasoning. Thus, it is not strange that the tradition of scientific thought has a history in India longer and richer than most other places.

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The scientific achievements of India are fascinating. Iron was known in the Ganga valley in the mid second millennium BCE. 

The Indus-Saraswati Civilization built planned towns with underground drainage, civil sanitation, hydraulic engineering, and air-cooling architecture covering a region about half the size of Europe. 

Weights and linguistic symbols were standardized across this vast geography, for a long period of over 1,000 years, from around 3,000 BCE to 1500 BCE. Textiles and steel were the mainstays of the British Industrial Revolution. Both had their origins in India. Textiles turned out to be the first major success of the Industrial Revolution, and Britain replaced India as the world's leading textile exporter. The technology, designs and even raw cotton were initially imported from India.

Why is India obsessed with a moon mission?

Is it competition with China, a flexing of muscles, a desire to claim India’s ‘rightful’ place in the community of nations or a genuine scientific pursuit of knowledge? 

Though ‘official’ history has, since the ascent of the West, been very biased towards a Western point of view, questioning minds have started correcting this propagandistic tilt of perspective by their open-minded studies and findings.

Why do we continue teaching in schools that Copernicus was the first astronomer to formulate a scientific heliocentric cosmology to challenge the Church’s view of Earth in the centre of universe, when the Indians, the Chinese, the Muslims, the Sumerians, the Mayas, and other civilizations had held these views centuries or millennia earlier?

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Many people argue that India sending moon probes is a terrible misallocation of resources. They argue that India should be feeding the poor, cleaning the environment and removing poverty. 

The fact that this can be a strong and vociferous public debate in India on this topic shows that there is freedom of speech and a functioning democracy. So, how should wealth be distributed? This is a very contentious topic and answers depend on who you ask. But, there are two basic theories of wealth distribution.

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Two Theories of Wealth Distribution

There are basically two theories of wealth distribution.

1. According to one theory, the rising tide lifts all boats, and everyone benefits (even if unequally) from rising prosperity. 
2. The second theory says that some boats are anchored and will sink when the rising tides come in. 

The graph above would show that wealth distribution of Gini-coefficient as it is measured is rather good for India, unlike many other countries of the world.

Many of the vigilant organizations like NGOs and social enterprises in India are the watchdogs trying to detect the anchors and make sure that anchored boats are freed to rise with the tides. Unlike somewhere else, where these NGOs and watchdogs would be in prison, they are doing their best to make sure that the rising tide of prosperity lifts all equally in India.

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Previous initiatives like Indira Gandhi's Garibi Hatao, or abolish poverty were dismal flops in India (4% of all funds allocated for economic development actually reached the three main anti-poverty programs), but this new wave of prosperity has improved the lives of more people than before.

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A country or culture, which does not have bold and far-reaching dreams, stagnates, while a country obsessed by mad visions is a concentration camp of misery. 

Visitors in India say that the overall mood in India is generally very upbeat after decades of stagnation. 

Visitors to North Korea have not reported such feelings.

Read more about the technical aspects of the mission here.