Slumdog Millionaire
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Slumdog Millionaire |
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 ndian film Slumdog Millionaire is being talked about as a possible Oscar contender. The movie based on Mumbai slums has already won four Golden Globe awards , including one for music composer A R Rahman, a first for an Indian.The movie is the story of how an Indian teen from Mimbai slums Jamal Malik became a contestant on the Hindi version of “Who Wants to be A Millionaire?” an endeavor made without prize money in mind, rather, an effort to prove his love for his friend Latika, who is an ardent fan of the show. Slumdog Millionaire has some interesting stories as well, like how Mercedes Benz refused to allow their product to be shown because they didn’t want to be associated with Slums. The Controversy Hindu groups have accused the film showing Hindus as intolerant to Muslim minority in India, while the fact is that Hindu minority living in a Muslim majority state of Kashmir were murdered, killed and raped and forced to leave their homes while Muslims have thrived in democratic India. Kanchan Gupta writes in his article Slumdog is about defaming Hindus: "Therefore, it is not surprising that Boyle’s film is about a slum where extreme social exclusion, political suppression and economic deprivation define the lives of its inhabitants. He has made every effort to shock and awe the film’s audience by taking recourse to graphic and gory portrayal of bloodthirsty Hindu mobs on the rampage — the idiom that defines India as it is imagined by the lib-left Western mind — laying to waste Muslim lives (a Hindu is shown slitting a Muslim woman’s throat in an almost frame-by-frame remake of the videotape that was released by the killers of Daniel Pearl) and property. There’s more that makes you want to throw up the last meal you had: Hindu policemen torturing Muslims by giving them ‘electric shock therapy’, street children being physically disfigured and then forced to beg, and such other scenes of a medieval society where rule of law does not exist and every Hindu is a rapacious monster eager to make a feast of helpless Muslims." "Nor is it surprising that Boyle should have cunningly changed the name of the film’s — as also the book’s — protagonist from Vikas Swarup’s Ram Mohammad Thomas (a sort of tribute to the Amar Akbar Antony brand of ‘secularism’ which was fashionable in the 1970s) to Jamal Malik. The name implies a Kashmiri connection, and we can’t put it beyond Boyle suggesting a link between Jamal’s travails — it is his mother whose throat is shown as being slit by a Hindu — and the imagined victimhood of Kashmir’s Muslims who, the lib-left intelligentsia in the West insists, are ‘persecuted by Hindu India’. Asked about the protagonist’s name being changed, Swarup is believed to have said that it was done to “make it sound more politically correct”. There is a second hidden message: The Hindu quizmaster on the ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ show has doubts about Jamal, who gets all the questions right, not because he is a ‘slumdog’ but because he is a Muslim; so he sets India’s Hindu police on the hapless boy. Swarup did not quite put it that way in his book, but the film does so, and understandably the critics in Hollywood who sport Obama buttons are impressed." |
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The most popular Indian Actor, Amitabh Bachan, Big B also has other views about the film. He says that the rags-to-riches tale of an orphan from a Mumbai slum didn’t impress him as it portrayed
 India as a “Third World dirty underbelly developing nation”. Big B has written on his blog- “It’s just that the SM (Slumdog Millionaire) idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a Westerner, gets creative Globe recognition. The other would perhaps not,” “If the movie projects India as a third world dirty underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” “Conditions world over are so similar. Perceptions differ, but the reality of life and existence, unchanged.
Comments for the film Slumdog Millionaire and the anger by some on its contents, prompt me to say the above.” ‘The commercial escapist world of Indian cinema has vociferously battled for years, on the attention paid and adulation given to legendary Satyajit Ray at all prestigious film festivals of the West and not a word of appreciation for the entertaining mass-oriented box office blockbusters that were being churned out from Mumbai.” “The argument: Ray portrayed reality. The other escapism, fantasy and incredulous posturing. Unimpressive for Cannes, Berlin and Venice. But look at how rapidly all that is changing.” But Irrfan Khan, a cast member who plays a police inspector in ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, has rejected criticism of that kind. He says, “If anyone has any objection to the depiction of poverty in the film they should first come forward and take initiative to remove it. Only talking won’t help.We can not shut our eyes from the fact that a large section of our country continues to live abject poverty which can not be removed by not being shown in a film. We need to work on grass-root level to remove this problem.” We wonder if Big B takes offence to a statement like that. Hope he doesn’t as every actor has full right to defend his movie and we fully trust the judgement of an actor of Irrfan’s calibre. |
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