The future of India

Demonstrating outside the Mumbai office of the Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor, who plays the game show host in “Slumdog Millionaire.” (Photo: Associated Press)

I find that photo ironic. Director Boyel explained that the word slum dog is a short of "Slum" and "underdog". Maybe he made that up when people started to complain. My wife believes so. Maybe. Who knows?

But the main point is, why should the slum dwellers care? Isn't the movie showing them in positive light - isn't the movie about what a slum dog, who barely survives through many near brushes with death can achieve. Even if it is by some "bizarre co-incidence"?

I hope that those boys holding the placard are somehow able to be at least half the man Jamal was. In the end the movie is about how, even in the face of such adversity, he never forgets his love for Latika. How, unlike his brother, he chooses the honest way of life. How love conquered all. It is the same guys who call this "poverty porn" who call Pather Panchali by the same name. They are not porn, they are works of art, and they are art because they result in the same emotional response as a great book or a soulful music does.

City of God is a movie about this slum in Brazil. It is a horrifying movie and in many ways other such movies like Salaam Bombay are unsettling. But they all show that there is hope. Even in that much squalor hope exists. It is, after all, the "quintessential human emotion".

When will we be able to come out of the politics - politics which has rounded up some slum children and handed them placards they cannot read themselves and asked them to stand in front of cameras of foreign news agencies?

Yes!!

He did it.
Though its not his greatest work - I am sure other Indians would agree that Sathiya, Roja, Bombay, Meenakshi, Swadesh, Laagan and many many more deserve an Oscar if Slumdog can get an Oscar. But... as long as he got it... who cares