Entertainment - Slumdog Oscar-aire

Chidanand Rajghatta

There is a particularly jolting, revolting moment early on in the film Slumdog Millionaire. Jamal, a young slum kid, is squatting over an open-air
potty of the kind still in use in India's villages and shantytowns. A chopper carrying a famous film star, who Jamal worships, lands nearby when he is in the middle of his business. But Jamal is locked in the loo by a mean-spirited brother. So, in despair to behold his hero, he holds his nose and dives into....

Alright, let's spare you the fetid details other than to say that as Jamal takes the plunge into what is delicately referred to as night soil in India, the audience at a preview of the film in Washington DC's Landmark theatre essayed a loud, collective "Yewwwww!" A group of us had squeezed in the movie preview during the final week of the election campaign earlier this month because there was such a buzz about it (the election of course, but the movie too). Besides, the movie was based on a book by an Indian diplomat, Vikas Swarup, who we knew from the time he was posted to Washington DC in the mid-1990s.

A delightful raconteur and mimic beneath a serious diplomatic veneer, Swarup also hid a talent for fiction that few of us recognised those days. Not even the message on his home phone answering machine, a startlingly good imitation of Bill Clinton's voice, convinced me that the yarn he said he was working on years later, when he was serving at the Indian High Commission in London, would click, much less be made into a movie.

It was about a slum kid who stumbles into the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire (Kaun Banega Crorepati) and manages to answer all questions to win the big prize. How this slum kid knows the answers to each of the questions (eg Who invented the revolver?) is a chapter in the book (originally titled Q & A) - and an episode in the movie.

Yeah, it's a stretch to think that every question Jamal is asked on the show is linked in some way to his Dickensian life. But in the hands of scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy (who wrote The Full Monty) and British director Danny Boyle (of Trainspotting fame), Q & A has turned into a film that, to borrow a line from one of those ads, hila kay rakh diya (shook us up). Critics are raving about it. The New York Times says the movie is a "sensory blowout" and has "attracted early Oscar buzz" and Roger Ebert thinks "it could land a best picture Oscar nomination."

But to return to that putrid scene, it was interesting to observe that the "yewww" from westerners stemmed mostly from mirth and amusement, while Indians seemed to react with disgust, even embarrassment. Perhaps, Indians have a different view of defilement from the westerners, who merely regard it as unclean and messy. It also left me wondering whether we have a problem acknowledging our Third World status, something the cricketer Matthew Hayden has been rubbing in lately.

It will probably irk a lot of Indian viewers and critics, but Slumdog is winning rave reviews because of its depiction of the 'real India,' previously seen in films such as City of Joy and Salaam Bombay, living side by side with the booming India shown in slick, more recent Bollywood movies. It adds up to what one critic said was "one of the most upbeat stories about living in hell imaginable."

Well, whatever the case, Slumdog seems headed for many prizes, perhaps even an Academy Award, and we all look forward to seeing Mrs and Mr Swarup, in silk saree and bandhgala respectively, on the red carpet in Hollywood come February.