Taking India to the World

A friend of mine recently sent me this article. I feel it encapsulates pretty much all that I feel about the film 'Slumdog Millionaire', which as its posters say, is a movie the 'whole world is talking about'. Tipped to win a number of Oscars, and having already won four golden globes, Slumdog Millionaire has been billed as a movie which shows the 'real India' to the world. As an Indian, I feel that this something the movie fails to do.

Make no mistake, I enjoyed watching the film. It was fun. But that's about where it ends. I don't think the film was fantastic. I don't think the music was brilliant. I certainly do not think that the film deserves an Oscar. Yes, I will feel extremely proud if I see A R Rahman and Anil Kapoor walking onto the stage, but I don't think the film deserves an Oscar. Rahman for one has made far far better music-the soundtracks of Roja, Lagaan, Swades to name a few, come to mind.

Most of my American friends loved the film-it was the classic third world story. Yet, the India shown in Slumdog is the India that most westerners would imagine in their heads. The movie reinforced cultural stereotypes. India=poverty and Bollywood. Now I'm not criticizing the film because it attempts to show life in the slums. After all, the slums of our cities are as much a part of India as the malls of our metropolitan cities. However I do feel that the movie does a bad job of showing life in the slums. The real world is a lot more complex than two smiling slum kids triumphing against a series of bad guys.

To put it simply, I believe that Slumdog Millionaire is a movie that is caught straddling two lanes-it provides a cocktail of poverty, love and the 'real' India, all in just over 2 hours. For Western audiences, there hasn't been a movie like this in a long time. It's not too shocking, it doesn't tell them anything they don't think they know, yet its different. It's its not surprising that they are lapping it up. In this respect, Danny Boyle got his film spot on. But for me, it neither explores the problems of the 'real' India in any amount of depth, nor does it have the elements of a traditional Bollywood film. And so it remains a good movie, and just that, a good movie.