Slumdog Millionaire
We watched the movie yesterday and found it gripping and entertaining. While this is not the first movie about Indian poverty made by a white man, it’s one of the more successful ones. I was particularly curious about the Indian reaction. I spent an hour or so reading up above the movie.
It’s hard to not notice Mumbai Socialites like Shobha De criticizing the Hollywood types for not “acknowledging” the mega industry that’s also called Bollywood. Smells a lot like the other common Indian complaint about Mohandas Gandhi not getting a Noble peace prize. My reaction to all of this is: if you really want to announce that India has arrived on the global scene, start a Dhirubhai award or something and make Europeans and North Americans covet it, instead of the other way around.
The thing that stands out is, apart from Rehman, other winners weren’t Indian. Dev Patel or Freida Pinto didn’t win any awards for example – although they did justice to their roles I thought. The scene when Jamal gets kicked in the eye after the Mercedez is broken into and the subsequent exchange:
Jamal: This is the real India
White couple: This is the real America
kinda gives away the biases of the director and the screen writer.
The other scene that most people are not going to forget for a long long time is the scene where the young Jamal falls into an open shit-pit, while trying to get an autograph from Amitabh (no wonder he’s upset). Makes me wonder if Arundhati Roy had anything to do with that particular scene (cf. passage from the God of small things: the smell of shit hovered over the city … like a hat).
What’s up with all these Mangalorean Christian hotties winding up in the movie industry these days 