Slumdog Millionaire: Reality in the Other World

Before I knew anything about the movie, I made a sweeping statement. “The West loves poverty in India, and India loves what the West does,” I told a friend with that hollow, distant, ungodly voice. I was wrong. We must thank the filmmakers behind Cidade de Deus and Slumdog Millionaire for bringing forward a truth bigger than the reality the movies themselves may or may not have portrayed: Everybody is fascinated with the other world’s problems, injustice, and destitution.

The US loved both the movies because they were about set in countries other than its own. I wonder how Cidade de Deus was received by Brazilians; they will love Slumdog Millionaire. India loved Cidade de Deus, at least the urban Indians who watched the movie and must no doubt have played a role in lifting it onto the pedestal of IMDB Top 250 apart from naming it among their favorite movies on their Orkut profiles. Many Indian friends, reviewers and celebrities however have been quick to get offended by Slumdog Millionaire.

As the rest of the world has already observed, Slumdog Millionaire is in several ways similar to Cidade de Deus. Both movies are set to a great extent in one of the largest slums of Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro respectively. Both movies depict the dangerous lives of children in these slums and provide us with an insight into the transformation of some of these children into hard-boiled criminals. Both movies have a protagonist who sticks to a less dangerous lifestyle. Both movies, IIRC, are shot and edited in a similar fashion and are ably supported by music with similar moods. There are more but let us get back to Slumdog Millionaire itself. That too, I don’t remember Cidade de Deus very well today.

Jamal is being interrogated for winning Rs. 10,000,000 on the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? contest, during the night before the final question on the show. He is a smart student of the world, bent and shaped by it, has seen more of it than most of us might ever do in our lifetimes – thank God for that – and works as a chai-wallah in a call center company. During his interrogation with the Police Inspector, he takes us through the journey of his life through snippets of them that explain how he could have known the answers to the quiz show questions.

Every turn in his life is dictated by his wish to live with Latika, his girl since childhood. Jamal earns the prize(s) with all his life until that moment. Never mind that I gave away the ending. The movie’s screenplay is the kind which makes movie philosophers quote that it is the journey that matters.

Danny Boyle and his crew have taken good care and Slumdog Millionaire is the result of hard work. Nevertheless, I believe that it could have been subtler; the divide between the rich and the poor is a chasm that a blind man won’t miss but is subtler. I mean the character of Prem Kumar by that.

There are things that one can nitpick about. Many have pointed out that it is unrealistic for the characters to speak in English, Jamal with traces of British-accent. As a movie made for the global audiences by a Hollywood director, Indians can only expect Mahabharat to be made in English. The TV programs are rarely transmitted live; a liberty taken for dramatic effects. While Salim and Latika have grown up as per expectations, Jamal’s fairer complexion in the third part of his life is just cliché; true.

I didn’t find it great enough to reach the IMDB Top 250, nor to have received most of the 10 Academy Award Nominations. AR Rehman has given better music a number of times and there are many better movies being made. But recollect the dialogue in Rajkumar Hirani’s Munnabhai MBBS: “I want poor people, hungry people.” Empathizing with destitution is a way in which the world feels better about itself.

Slumdog Millionaire as a movie is well-made, interesting, and thoughtful, while sometimes seeming formulaic. Let us not worry that Roger Ebert or any other revered critic from the rest of the world is misled into thinking that it represents the real India to the world. Let us not dislike the movie on that apprehension. India like many other countries is a mosaic all the hues of which can’t be represented in one movie. (Ebert himself describes a larger brick of that real India in the fourth and fifth paragraphs of the review linked.) The presence of such Shocking India need not be hidden in the closet by the Shining India. It is to be accepted and worked on. If a movie made about it gets all the attention from the world, if it helps alleviating those lives of generation to come, all the better.

Image Source: Official Slumdog Millionaire Poster.

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