Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:50:50 -0800 (PST) From: Samir Kelekar <[email protected]>
At last, a different viewpoint. Actually, I havent seen the movie, nor do I wish to spend Rs. 100/- on seeing it, even though it may have won Oscars. I dont quite like these KBC kind of shows, which make you a millionaire on answering a few questions. Also, I find it really funny that the whole of urban India judges success of its movies by whether they won an American award or not. Indians seriously have a self-esteem problem! Mario responds: Samir, You are free to dislike KBC shows and to save your Rs. 100 so that you can go watch some other, more typical, even more unrealistic Bollywood fantasy, but your comment about the acclaim for this show is a gross misrepresentation. Slumdog Millionaire did not just sweep the Oscars - which you describe as an American award, but which really encompasses movies made around the world, even in India as we now know - it was highly acclaimed, recognised and awarded in virtually every international forum where critics pass judgment on movies. It has also been a commercial success, whereas many critically acclaimed movies fail at the box office. Besides, this was just a movie, for crying out loud, not some serious treatise on social conditions in India like some are misconstruing it to be. Even if it were, it did expose India's dark underbelly of abject poverty and mind-boggling filth far more realistically than any Bollywood movie has ever done with their ridiculous and fantastic and comical depictions of India and Indian life - improbably breaking out into song and dance at the drop of a hat. Can anyone deny that the poverty, filth and atrocities the film exposes are not part of slum life in India - or is everyone in the Indian middle-class so cynical and callous and blind to reality that they are unaware of this? I hope the exposure sensitizes Indians and others to the plight of the slumdwellers and spurs some genuine economic action that would use this resource, skilled at survival against crippling odds. I credit the Brits who were the brains behind this movie for whatever realism is in it, however dark, and the Indians who were in the movie for it's genuine charm, which individual Indians are being increasigly recognized for around the world. The stars and the slum kids were bright and charming and unselfconscious when interviewed by reporters more used to interviewing superstars. They represented India well and average Americans noticed and were impressed. Though I would have preferred Freida in a sari, her royal blue gown was by a major designer and she held her own, even stood out, among some of the most glamorous movie stars in the world. She absolutely belonged there. This is not just my opinion, but that of major movie critics, many of whom described her as gorgeous. 65 million Indians live like these slumdwellers, while most middle-class Indians pretend they don't even exist. I have just returned from Mumbai and the stifling stench of the Bandra slums and of Dharavi is still in my nostrils even without going behind the rows of leather-goods shops with their world-class products at bargain prices. If Indians have a self-esteem problem it does not lie in western acclaim, but in their own failure to acknowledge and accept that 65 million of their fellow citizens are "slumdogs", and they better provide the infrastructure, education and job opportunities to lift them up from these conditions before laying any claim to be a superpower. Perhaps a good place to start would be for Indians in general to start paying their taxes as they are supposed to, start electing honest politicians, and showing some consideration for each other in public places including on the roads and highways.
