Slumdog Millionaire

Yes. Last night, thanks to my son, I finally got to see Slumdog Millionaire.
(My rating:***stars. However, it has won 8 Oscars and that is all that matters)

Bollywood has finally arrived, albeit through the hands of a Brit…I can assure you that if the name Danny Boyle had not been stamped all over the film, it would not have had the success it has had…like the fact that while writing a book on Gandhi may get you the Nobel Prize, Gandhi himself would have never won the Nobel Peace Prize…or, the reality that the well known Indian poet Tagore qualified for the Nobel Prize in Literature only after Yeats ‘discovered’ him…the success of Slumdog Millionaire is a reassurance to all my white friends that they still rule the world, and, the likes of Hindustan will always need their approval before they can make it big…God’s in His Heaven and all’s right with the still Rudyard Kipling-esque world…

It is interesting that a Brit made the film…for I believe that while many white races ruled parts of India it is only the Brits who understood it well enough to really rule it and milk it thoroughly…much better than even the locally born politicians of today can…the film has that understanding stamped all over it…

The point here is that I cannot see an American making Slumdog Millionaire, a Canadian perhaps, yes, but, Canadians are more British than Americans are…and now, of course, there is a reverse colonialism of sorts for I read in a restaurant menu the other day, “Chikken Tikka Masala, the national dish of Britain…” as a close relative of mine once said, “The Indian restaurants on London’s Drummond Street are perhaps the best payback Britain is getting for two hundred and fifty years of the Raj…”

To those of my white friends who keep asking me, “Does Slumdog really show the true India ?” in the tone of someone wanting confirmation that the ghosts and ghouls in Shyamalan’s horror films really exist, the answer is Yes. That is India…

at the same time I can assure them that I can take them to parts of downtown Detroit or even Toronto that would qualify for similar status…

Also, for those of us Mumbaikars who have grown up in the city when it was Bombay, just remember the ‘sixties song that Uma and Usha, the daughters of the then Police Commissioner of Bombay sang:

Come from England, Come from Scotland, Come from Ayre-land
Come from Holland, Come from Poland, Come from any land
Come to Bombay, Come to Bombay, Bombay meri Hai
(Bombay meri Hai, Bombay is mine)
…..

The ladies are nice
The girls are full of spice
Bombay Meri Hai…

Yes, along with the cess pools like the one the young Jamal falls into, in his quest for Amitabh’s autograph, there is a spirit and spunk to Bombay that really makes us, Mumbaikars, say, Bombay Meri Hai, in the spirit of a mother hugging her child…

One more point, the movie is a testament to the Westminster-style liberalism that the Brits built up in India, fostered subsequently by the Nehrus of the world (more English than the English as several people in India maintain)… that a senior Indian diplomat, currently the Deputy High Commissioner in Pretoria, authored the book ‘Q&A’ on which the movie is based…I cannot think of many so-called bastions of western style freedom of speech, where a serving civil servant would not lose his job for writing such an expose of the underbelly…the President of India actually congratulated Vikas Swarup when Slumdog bagged all the Oscars that it did…and catch the Chinese allowing such a film on the cess pools of Shanghai !!...which I am sure exist…

I also believe that Slumdog won the awards that it has because it gives expression to the human belief that things will finally always change for the better, particularly in these recessionary days...like the other myth that good ultimately triumphs over evil…

Time and again we have heard of rags to riches stories, and, we always believe that one day each of us is destined to find that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and life will change for the better thereafter.

There is a saying attributed to the Buddha that two mountains of gold will not be sufficient to satisfy the cravings of a single human, and, once the two mountains of gold come your way you will still want the third, and, the fourth…and the ending of Slumdog Millionaire and the finale fantasy dance of Jai Ho (may there be success) in between two trains on a Bombay suburban platform summarizes the human dream, fantasy or hope, choose the word you want to…

Jai Ho

PS--- Never again will I be able to listen to the bhajan ‘darshan do ghanshyam nath…’ without flinching…it is one of my favourites and Slumdog has put a new perspective on it…

PPS --- I had answers to all the questions including the Jeff Hobbs one. Does that get me the twenty million ?