A hyped film and loony ambassadors

Was Slumdog hyped beyond its worth?

It may be a belated review of a film which gained jingoistic reviews. I watched Slumdog Millionaire the other day and I felt it was hyped much beyond its worth. In the first place, the story seemed to me illogical; a guy getting all his answers right in the Indian version of Who Wants to be Millionaire purely from his life’s experiences. So much for a rag-to-riches fairytale.

The first half of the film was pretty okay with the travails and hardships of the lead character Jamal. The background music in most of the places put me off and they seemed out of the place, qualifying it to be tagged as just another Bollywood flick. I'm not juxtaposing the movies’ immense popularity to its winning eight Oscars, for Oscar is not the ultimate word in the film world.

After watching this I was reminded of City of Gods. The Brazilian movie also uses real life characters from a Brazil slum. But the comparison, I feel, just ends there. Slumdog doesn’t reach anywhere near this Brazilian movie, be it in craft or treatment.

I also found some similarities between a grown-up Salim, Jamal’s brother, and Rocket, the main character in City of Gods: from the way he holds the gun to his gait. But I am not sure whether this is pure coincidence or not.

One positive thing about the film as said by my dear friend Abis is that at least “some slum kids got to act in a movie, got admitted in school, had the chance to see "good things", felt important....” And it’s heartening that all the proceeds from the film will go for the benefits of the slum kids. I wish this movie will act as a catalyst for initiating a movement that will lead to eradication of the squalid underbelly of a “growing superpower”.

Where’s the poverty?

What baffled me most is why the ambassadors of India-shining campaign went ballistic with the selling-India-abroad whine. Because the film has only a very few passing shots of the slums, inevitable for the movie’s main story about a slum kid.

There's nothing in the film that suggests that it glorifies poverty in India. Now I think all those Bachchans and the like went to town with their pseudo-nationalism even before watching the film. They seemed to have jumped the gun just on hearing that word slum.

Talking about Bachchan he is hypocrisy personified. There is little reason to think that the yester-year superstar was so much concerned about India’s name abroad or the poor people here. He is the one who unabashedly acted as the brand ambassador of Eveready, a product once loathed and boycotted by many because it came from a company responsible for one of world’s greatest ever industrial disasters: Bhopal tragedy. Did he ever give a damn for the victims for whom justice is still a mirage?

These pseudo patriots were peeved because this film 'discredited' India's name in the international arena. This is patriotism minus responsibility and politics! These guys never had a problem when India's name was tarnished internationally when a state-sponsored genocide killed thousands many rendered refugees in Gujarat.