From BBC:
Tag Archive for 'Slumdog Millionaire'
Jyoti Thattam in Time:
On a dirt track under the midday sun, Irrfan Khan waits at the starting line. The 42-year-old actor is playing a poor army recruit from a village in central India who runs just to get the extra ration of food allotted to athletes. At his first race, his character doesn’t know what to do when the pistol sounds, so he prays. “You idiot! Run!” the starter screams. That spurs the soldier into action, and the naive confusion on his face turns into determination. Extras from the Bengal Sappers — actual young army recruits who live on the base in Roorkee in northern Uttarakhand state, where the movie is being filmed — crowd around the sidelines as he lowers his head and takes off.
This kind of character — the village boy who succeeds against all odds — is a staple of Bollywood, India’s film industry, the largest in the world. But Khan turns it into something more. In his hands, the true story of Paan Singh Tomar, a track-and-field champion turned mountain bandit, becomes a parable about the frustrated poor. Khan says the film, written and directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia, an old friend from drama school, appealed to him because it follows the hero once he has been forgotten. “It talks about our system,” he says. “It’s a sign for any nation, any society — how much they are prepared to care for a talent.” More:
[Image: www.irrfan.com]
Robert McCrum in The Observer:
Chetan Bhagat
A year after the launch of Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning movie of Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A, some more quiz questions: Who is the most read living Indian writer? Is it a) Aravind Adiga (Booker prize-winning author of The White Tiger); b) Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children); c) Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy); or d) Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)?
The answer: none of these. Two generations after independence, one of the vital characteristics of the new India is that the educated middle class who once turned to English for business applications now see it in a different light. To them, in a manner typical of English language and culture in many parts of formerly colonial society, it is becoming decoupled from its bitter imperial past.
This new middle-class audience – small entrepreneurs, managers, travel agents, salespeople, secretaries, clerks – has an appetite for literary entertainment that falls between the elite idiom of the cultivated literati, who might be familiar with the novels of Amitav Ghosh or Salman Rushdie, and the Indian English of the street and the supermarket. Theirs is the Indian English of the outsourcing generation. For these people, there is only one author: Chetan Bhagat. Who? More:
Oscar-winner A.R. Rahman’s song “NaNa” (click above to listen) from the Hollywood film “Couples Retreat” has been shortlisted for nomination in original song category for the 82nd Academy Awards. It will be competing with 62 other songs.
Rahman’s son Ameen also makes his singing debut in this track.
Couples Retreat is a comedy film directed by Peter Billingsley and written by Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn and Dana Fox.
Photo: Vikas Swarup's website
In the New York Times, a review of Vikas Swarup’s new book, “Six Suspects.” Swarup is the author of “Q&A,” the novel that became the basis for the smash-hit film “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Mr. Swarup’s second novel, “Six Suspects,” is a Bollywood version of the board game Clue with a strain of screwball comedy thrown in. Its stock characters are easily identified: the Bureaucrat, the Actress, the Tribal, the Thief, the Politician and the American. Each attended the party at which a man named Vicky Rai, a playboy film producer, was murdered. Each has a gun and a motive. And although the story’s geographical span is even bigger than India, the whole thing feels handily confined to the kind of isolated, air-tight setting that Agatha Christie’s readers love.
Thanks to such a schematic setup “Six Suspects” is gleeful, sneaky fun. But it’s also a much more freewheeling book than the format implies. Mr. Swarup, an Indian diplomat, brings a worldly range of attributes to his potentially simple story. And he winds up delivering a rambling critique of Indian culture, taking shots at everything from racism to reality TV. Yet Mr. Swarup’s style stays light and playful, preferring to err on the side of broad high jinks rather than high seriousness. A fizzy romp seems to be the main thing he has in mind. More:
Paul MacInnes in the Guardian:
It’s boom time in Dharavi. Actually, it’s always boom time in Dharavi, the Mumbai slum that’s home to 600,000 people and a not inconsiderable number of businesses. Specialising in the recycling of plastic, metal and paper waste, the slum is a warren of industry, turning over an estimated $665m a year (£405m). And that was before people came wanting to see where Jamal dodged the coppers in Slumdog Millionaire.
Mumbai encompasses many slums but if any has become synonymous with Danny Boyle’s Oscar-herding movie, it is Dharavi. The setting for the breathtaking opening chase sequence, operators now run daily tours through the sprawling district. Like watching the movie itself, it is an oddly uplifting experience; a few hours in Dharavi – with all the colours, industry and sheer life crammed inside – feels not like wallowing in other people’s poverty, but rather like being forced to contemplate your own laziness. More:
From 3quarksdaily:
Bonnie Fuller at the Huffington Post:
News of The World headline
How can it be that the star of the Oscar winning Best Picture of the Year, a little nine year-old girl, can be fated to be sold to the highest bidder by her poverty-stricken family? The movie has made $326 million so far — how can she still be living in a shack?
The British tabloid News of the World is standing by the detailed story they broke about the father and brother of “Slumdog Millionaire” child actress Rubina Ali demanding $400,000 for their “Oscar child.” Though the father is now denying that he tried to sell his daughter, he’s been arrested by the Mumbai police and a huge uproar has ensued.
Local papers in Mumbai, where Rubina lives in the sprawling slums, have reported that her biological mother, Khurshid, got into a physical altercation with her daughter’s stepmother after the story broke. She is now demanding custody of her daughter. Meanwhile relatives of the father, Rafique, explained to The Times of India: “Why will he sell her? She is going to earn so much more? Does anyone sell a cow that can still be milked?” More:
[Update: Since this post was written, the "Slumdog Millionaire" trust fund has hired a social worker to look after Rubina's interests in India. Read more here]
The recent career trajectory of Vikas Swarup is nearly as preposterous as the plot of his novel “Q&A” that the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” is based on. Mark McDonald in The New York Times:
Photo: Vikas Swarup's website
It’s an impossible story, really, how a modest fellow from a family of lawyers becomes a back-office diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, writes his first novel in a feverish two months, finds a clientless agent over the Internet and has a British director turn his mid-list book into a movie that wins the best-picture Academy award and seven other Oscars.
The recent career trajectory of Vikas Swarup is nearly as preposterous as the plot of his novel, “Q & A,” the tale of an uneducated waiter from a Mumbai slum who wins a billion rupees on an Indian quiz show. Mr. Swarup, 47, recently found himself onstage at the Academy Awards, celebrating in the joyous scrum of young Indian actors from “Slumdog Millionaire.”
From The Telegraph:
Barbara Broccoli, the executive producer of the Bond films, hopes the 24-year-old actress will appear in the next instalment, according to The Sun. Pinto, who was born in Mumbai, is said to have come to the attention of the Bond production team during the making of Quantum of Solace, the last film in the series.
From The Sun:
“She was too young at the time to have a part as a love interest for a secret agent. “But she has blossomed into an incredibly stunning young woman and would look perfect on Daniel Craig’s arm.
[Photos: Slumdog Millionaire and 007 official websites]
Rose George at The Guardian’s Comment is Free:
When you write a book about sanitation, people are always sending you helpful things to read or watch. I lost count of the number of friends who urged me to watch Slumdog Millionaire. “You’ll understand why,” they said. And I did, when the latrines came into view. I knew that slum; Juhu Beach, near Mumbai’s non-international airport, has millionaire Bollywood stars living on one side and the Slumdog slum on the other. The film has been accused of all sorts, but most commonly “poverty porn”. I think it did well to capture the paradox of slum life, which is that it is awful and that it can provoke entrepreneurial survival skills which can be worth millions: Dharavi, Mumbai’s most famous slum, has a recycling industry that earns £800m a year.
From The Telegraph, Calcutta:
The Congress has acquired the rights to Jai ho, the Slumdog Millionaire song that won the Academy award for best song, from music distributor T-Series for an undisclosed sum.
The chartbuster, written by Gulzar, sung by Sukhwinder Singh and set to music by A.R. Rahman, will be “suitably amended” before being used as the party’s signature song in the election campaign. So- urces said Jai Ho’s “soul and spirit” would be retained.
The attempt will be to convey the song’s sense of “grit, optimism and hope”. The party will approach the trio behind the winning number to carry out the improvisations.
Arundhati Roy at Dawn.com
The night before the Oscars, in India, we were re-enacting the last few scenes of Slumdog Millionaire. The ones in which vast crowds of people – poor people – who have nothing to do with the game show, gather in the thousands in their slums and shanty towns to see if Jamal Malik will win. Oh, and he did. He did. So now everyone, including the Congress Party, is taking credit for the Oscars that the film won!
The party claims that instead of India Shining it has presided over India ‘Achieving’. Achieving what? In the case of Slumdog, India’s greatest contribution, certainly our political parties’ greatest contribution is providing an authentic, magnificent backdrop of epic poverty, brutality and violence for an Oscar-winning film to be shot in. So now that too has become an achievement? Something to be celebrated? Something for us all to feel good about? Honestly, it’s beyond farce.
Salman Rushdie in The Guardian on movies and movies based on books:
Adaptation, the process by which one thing develops into another thing, by which one shape or form changes into a different form, is a commonplace artistic activity. Books are turned into plays and films all the time, plays are turned into movies and also sometimes into musicals, movies are turned into Broadway shows and even, by the ugly method known as “novelisation”, into books as well. We live in a world of such transformations and metamorphoses. Good movies – Lolita, The Pink Panther – are remade as bad movies; bad movies – The Incredible Hulk, Deep Throat – are remade as even worse movies; British TV comedy series are turned into American TV comedy series, so that The Office becomes a different The Office, and Ricky Gervais turns into Steve Carell, just as, long ago, the British working-class racist Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part turned into the American blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker in All In the Family. British reality programmes are adapted to suit American audiences as well; Pop Idol becomes American Idol when it crosses the Atlantic, Strictly Come Dancing becomes Dancing With the Stars – a programme which, it may interest you to know, invited me to appear on it last season, an invitation I declined.
Mint-Lounge commemorates the actor’s remarkable journey with an essay by Rachel Dwyer, professor of Indian cultures and cinema at the School of Oriental and African studies, University of London, and author, most recently, of What do Hindus Believe? What makes the Big B legacy, she asks. And what does it say about us?
Bachchan is more than just a highly successful film star. How did he come to represent India itself on the world stage in the last decade of his 40-year-old career? What does this tell us about him, the nature of stardom, Hindi films and the vision that new India has of itself?
Dwyer says the other Bollywood icon, Shah Rukh Khan, “may be the current top box-office star, someone who is likely to enjoy many more years of stardom, he is not yet half way to Bachchan’s 40 years in cinema.” Click here to read the full essay, One-man show
When Sanjukta Sharma of Mint-Lounge asked Bachchan how he would assess his own body of work, he said, “Mediocre! I have had the privilege though to have been in the company of some of the great directors and actors of my profession, who have truly been masters. I doubt I ever lived up to their expectations. It was their generosity to have tolerated my incompetence.” Click here to read the full interview
Anand Giridharadas in International Herald Tribune:
If India’s well-to-do ran the world, the film that dominated the Academy Awards this week might simply have been called “Millionaire.”
That aspect of the movie – about hope – the well-to-do liked. It was the other aspect, distilled in the word “Slumdog,” that was so deflating.
The boom era now fading left two longings among India’s globalized rich. The first is a desire for recognition by the West, through magazine covers and Booker Prizes and Grammys. The second is a desire to show the world the most sanitized representation of India, not the stereotypical India mired in poverty and degradation, but an India as pristine as the elite’s own posh homes.
India’s euphoria over Slumdog Millionaire’s Oscar sweep reveals much about its national character, writes Tunku Varadarajan in Times Online
Search every corner of the globe, I say, and you will not find a people more complex – and complexed – than Indians. Quite without irony, a nation, many of whose citizens had just been heaping abuse and lawsuits on Slumdog Millionaire for showing India in a bad light, and for using the intolerable word “dog” to describe those poor little slum-wallahs, is now in a state of euphoric bhangra over its winning eight statuettes conferred by an “academy” that regards a bunch of Scientologists (not to mention Mickey Rourke) as icons. Maybe it’s a result of 200 years of colonialism, but Indians are world champions at caring – really caring! – about what foreigners (more accurately, Westerners) think or say about them. They will live blithely with impressively foetid slums in their midst, thinking nothing of the juxtaposition of Victorian-era poverty and world-class, 21st-century living standards. But the national outrage stirred when a Western film-maker uses “slumdog” in the title of his film is an incandescent sight to behold.
Why does Slumdog Millionaire – or for that matter, Bollywood — strike a chord with Americans? Cultural currency is capital, and America’s intensifying interest in India is an asset waiting to be used, writes National Review deputy managing editor Kevin D. Williamson in The Indian Express.
I knew things had turned a corner when garden-variety Anglo-suburban Americans started correcting my Marathi, which is to say when they started regarding my use of “Bombay” rather than “Mumbai” as denoting an embarrassing lack of sophistication on par with using a fork and spoon, instead of chopsticks, at a Chinese restaurant. Not that I speak a word of Marathi, at least not a word one would use in polite company. And not that these would-be sophisticates do, either, but I’ll bet dollars to dosas that it’s only a matter of time before American hipsters start eating khichdi with their fingers in trendy Indo-fusion bistros.
Slumdog Millionaire? In the US, it’s Slumdog Everywhere.
Why is India going overboard about Slumdog Millionaire? It is not a victory for Indian cinema, says Sandipan Deb in The Indian Express. Yes, rejoice for the six children who acted in it. And for AR Rahman for winning two Oscars for his music. But Sandipan a;so says that Rahman’s music in the movie “is not even of his average quality.”He is all praise for the other ‘Best Film’ nominee: The Reader.
“Frankly, I don’t think Slumdog Millionaire deserved the Oscar for best film. And even more frankly, I don’t think Resul Pookutty should have invoked “my country and my civilisation” in his acceptance speech for best sound mixing.”
John Elliott (on his blog Riding the Elephant) has a different take on Slumdog’s Oscars. He says the awards “are a win in India’s success story.” “As A.R.Rahman, the Indian composer, who won two Oscars for the best score and for his hit song Jai Ho, said after receiving his award, Slumdog is all about “optimism and the power of hope in our lives”. And that is the mood of Dharavi and of India’s millions of budding success stories.”
Posted by Namita Bhandare:
A flat joke about his ‘ma’ and a bland generalisation about love. Here’s the acceptance speech that I would have written for A.R. Rahman for his two-Oscar win for best song (Jai Ho) and best soundtrack (for Slumdog Millionaire).
“Jai Ho to this wonderful audience and to audiences everywhere, including at home in India.
This award represents something awesome. For me, it is the recognition that Indian sounds are truly global. And just as the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sahib took the sounds of his native Pakistan and mixed it to a world beat, working with the talented Peter Gabriel who is my co-nominee for his work in Wall-E, I too hope to be able to use my music to unite one world in one harmonious sound.
Slumdog Millionaire, as you know, is set in Mumbai which was the venue of a devastating terrorist strike on November 26. I don’t wish to trade charges or get into a blame game but I do wish to point out that Slumdog Millionaire is ultimately an affirmative film about hope and love and optimism. This is also the spirit of Mumbai which rose to the challenge of responding to the strikes. And this is also the spirit of human beings everywhere in the world: we will not be cowed down by terror.
[Insert para of people to be thanked, including mother, Danny Boyle etc]
Finally, I wish to thank Allah. I know many of you in this audience are victims of Fox News propaganda. I wish to assure you that the vast, vast majority of Muslims in the world are people like me – people who go about doing their jobs quietly and honestly; people who pray for a better world through music and through love.
Thank you.”
From The Times: Scores of people gathered to watch the Oscars ceremony on television in the tiny ramshackle hutments of Garib Nagar, the area where the film’s British director, Danny Boyle, found Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, and Rubina Ali Qureshi, 9, who play the film’s lead characters as children. In the photo above, neighbors of Azharuddin watch the a telecast near his home in a slum in Bandra, suburban Mumbai. Azharuddin, who is attending the ceremony, played the youngest version of Salim, the brother of the main character Jamal, in the movie.
Acceptances speeches
Best director Danny Boyle [comes on stage jumping]: “My kids are too young to remember this, but I swore that if this miracle ever happened, I would receive it in the spirit of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, so that’s what that was about. Thanks everyone at Warner Brothers for passing on to Fox Searchlight. Just to say to Mumbai – unending, unseparable, unborn – all of you who helped us make the film and all of you who didn’t, thank you so much. You dwarf even the sky.”
A R Rahman (after winning best song): “All my life I’ve had a choice of hate or love, I chose love and I’m here. God Bless”
Freida Pinto and Kate Winslet
And what did you think of Freida Pinto’s dress? “A royal blue success with an interesting neckline or a fussy style too dowdy for the young actress,” asks The Times in its story on 20 best and worst dresses. The paper puts Freida’s dress in the “We just can’t decide about…” category.
Please go to search or click the Movies icon for more stories on Slumdog Millionaire.
Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s novel, Q&A, set in Mumbai, sweeps the Oscars with eight awards including best picture and best director. Music maestro A.R. Rahman scores a double win (best original score and best original song for Jai Ho along with Gulzar). And Resul Pookutty takes home a statue for best sound. “In 80 years of Academy history no Indian technician has been nominated for an Oscar. I’m the first to be nominated, and the first to win,” he is quoted saying backstage by BBC.
A list of the Super Eight bagged by Slumdog:
1. Best Movie
2. Best Director (Danny Boyle)
3. Best Original Song (A.R. Rahman for Jai Ho)
4. Best Original Score (A.R. Rahman)
5. Best Film Editing (Chris Dickens)
6. Best Sound Mixing (Ian Tapp, Resul Pookutty)
7. Best Cinematography (Anthony Dod Mantle)
8. Best Adapted Screenplay (Simon Beaufoy)
And not to forget, India-inspired Smile Pinki bags best documentary!
To understand what makes Rahman a global tunesmith, click here.
To read stories on Slumdog and Smile Pinki previously published on AW, please hit search.
She’s expertly navigating the red carpet, one pretty dress at a time. ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ star Freida Pinto is Hollywood’s latest style icon. Parizaad Khan and Rachana Nakra in Mint Lounge:
Looking at images of Freida Pinto descending the red carpet in some of the world’s hottest fashion labels, it’s difficult to believe that she once shopped at Fashion Street, a street market popular with Mumbai’s college students.
The 24-year-old resident of the Mumbai suburb of Malad has been hailed by the foreign press as Hollywood’s latest It Girl as she does the rounds of the awards circuit with the rest of the cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire. Pinto has come in No. 1 and No. 3 for two consecutive weeks on Vogue’s 10 Best Dressed, a weekly list of stylish women that the magazine’s online edition singles out. She’s also featured in the March issue of Vanity Fair. Blogs on celebrity dressing, such as Bellasugar.com and Gofugyourself.com, have raved about, among other things, her hair and eyebrows.
[Photo: www.freidapinto.com]
Also in Mint Lounge: Freido Pinto on what she’s thinking about on the red carpet:
‘I have mastered the art of graceful exits from the car’
A.R. Rahman, the prolific Indian film composer behind the “Slumdog Millionaire” score, has been nominated for three Academy Awards. From The New York Times:
A. R. Rahman knows how big a deal it would be if he wins an Oscar on Sunday.
One of the most prolific and successful film composers in India, he has three nominations, all for “Slumdog Millionaire”: best original score and best original song, for both “Jai Ho” and “O … Saya,” a collaboration with the Sri Lankan-British rapper M.I.A. (The film, by Danny Boyle, has 10 nominations, and last month Mr. Rahman won a Golden Globe for best score.)
“It would be a great honor,” Mr. Rahman said with characteristic diffidence in a phone interview this week from Los Angeles, where he was preparing to perform at the ceremony. “It would help me to do bigger things.”
From The Indian Express:Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail (above), the youngest Salim in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, and Rubina Ali, the young Latika, in their homes in Bandra, Mumbai, on Friday, February 20. They were preparing to leave for Sunday evening’s Academy Awards. Photos: Mahendra Parekh. Read story here, here and here
In The New York Times: The squalor in Dharavi depicted in “Slumdog Millionaire” is unjust. To understand such a place solely by the generic term “slum” ignores its complexity and dynamism.
Also in NYT: Is it ‘poverty porn’? Does it promote ’slum tourism’? Why have some Indians attacked the film? Opinion by Chitra Divakaruni, author of “Palace of Illusions,” Amresh Sinha, who teaches film and media studies at NYU, and Sadia Shepard, author of “The Girl From Foreign.”
M.I.A’s music strikes dissonant undertones to some Sri Lankans, writes Thomas Fuller in the New York Times
To many Americans, Maya Arulpragasam, known as M.I.A., is the very pregnant rapper who gyrated across the stage at Sunday’s Grammy Awards.
Yet in Sri Lanka, where she spent her childhood years, M.I.A. remains virtually unknown. And some who do know her work say she is an apologist for the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels fighting in the country’s long-running civil war.
M.I.A. — who has been nominated for an Oscar for the song she co-wrote for the hit film “Slumdog Millionaire” — has branded herself through music videos and interviews as the voice of the country’s Tamil minority. In the video for her song “Bird Flu,” for instance, children dance in front of what looks like the rebels’ logo: a roaring tiger.
“Being the only Tamil in the Western media, I have a really great opportunity to sort of bring forward what’s going on in Sri Lanka,” she said in an interview on the PBS program “Tavis Smiley” last month. “There’s a genocide going on.”
And click here to watch a YouTube video of MIA’s Bird Flu.
Slumdog taps into Western curiosity about a country whose weight is increasingly felt in ordinary lives, writes Sadanand Dhume in Yale Global Online
The unexpected international success of “Slumdog Millionaire” has pleased some Indians while provoking unusually strong protests from others. The critical and commercial success of the film, contrasted with sharp criticism and a lackluster run in Indian theaters, captures the inherent contradictions of an increasingly globalized country. India basks in the glow of international recognition, but resents the critical scrutiny that global exposure brings.
Not since Sir Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi” has a film about India captured the world’s imagination as strongly as “Slumdog Millionaire,” director Danny Boyle’s gritty yet uplifting drama about a boy from the slums of Mumbai who makes good as a game-show contestant on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” The low-budget production – which cost $15 million to make, a pittance in Hollywood terms – has garnered both commercial and critical success, grossing $96 million worldwide as of February 1st, and picking up four Golden Globe awards and 10 Oscar nominations. In one among a raft of glowing reviews, Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern hailed “Slumdog” as “the world’s first globalized masterpiece.”
Victor Mallet in The Financial Times:
Dharavi slum, Mumbai. Photo: Chris Pryor
My first sight of Dharavi, the part of Mumbai reputed to be Asia’s largest slum, was as unlike the conventional tourist tableau of India – all snake charmers and sadhus – as it is possible to witness. On a smouldering garbage dump above a mangrove swamp on the slum’s edge, men squatted here and there with tucked-up loincloths, defecating in the morning light. Mangy dogs skulked between mounds of construction waste and household rubbish.
This was reality tourism with a vengeance. Even as we entered the bustling and somehow less daunting streets and alleyways of Dharavi itself, some of our tour group began to wilt in the heat, damp and stench of the monsoon season last year.
[Dharavi walking tour Rs400 per person; tour with car pick-up Rs800; private tour Rs3,200. One US$ = approx Rs 50. www.realitytoursandtravel.com]
From The Guardian:
The Mumbai shanty town featured in the film Slumdog Millionaire offers a better model than does western architecture for ways to house a booming urban population in the developing world, Prince Charles said yesterday.
Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 residents are crammed into 520 acres, contains the attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world’s increasingly urban population, he said. The district’s use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to “an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to ‘warehouse’ the poor”.
Here in India, films about poverty used to cause great offence. But not Slumdog Millionaire. Ian Jack in The Guardian:
The first director is Louis Malle, whose documentary series, Phantom India, examined some indisputable truths about so much of Indian life. The second is Danny Boyle, whose Slumdog Millionaire, pictured below, takes some of the same truths, dramatises and exaggerates them inside a fantastical story – which slum boy is going to jump into an oozing latrine, even for the autograph of Amitabh Bachchan? – set to Bollywood melodies. Something has happened in the years between these films, to western as well as to Indian sensibilities. The reasons are complicated, but perhaps the main ones are that Indian society is a thousand times more confident, that the word “vulgar” has vanished from the critical lexicon, and that the world has grown very small.
India has always had a difficult relationship with its easily observable poverty. Thirty years ago, the government’s PR departments would express a sullen disappointment that foreign writers were so “obsessed” by it. Its depiction abroad was seen, with just a little justice, as a plot against national ambition.
