With the movie 'Slumdog Millionaire' sweeping the Golden Globe awards and picking up 10 Oscar nominations, I walked in to watch this movie with high levels of curiosity (& some amount of pride) . But how disgusting an experience it turned out to be! In summary: Here's a British studio dishing out a movie for the global audience on the sorry state of affairs in a country that has nothing but poverty, filth, violence and lawlessness - what better choice than India??
Unlike popular assumption, this is not a rags-to-riches story. And it is definitely not the struggle of a great dream born in the slums. The story is of a boy perpetually in search of his girl and how his destiny ultimately 'takes' him to her. Everything else just forms part of the backdrop - slums & the accompaniment, and the millionaire TV show. It is quite obvious that global stereotyped image of India being a country of beggars and snake-charmers has been conveniently used and extended.
The director goes the whole hog to paint a grim picture of the country and in the process nothing is left out - impoverished state of the slums, riots and man-slaughter, horrendous exploitation of children, prostitution, systematic duping of foreign tourists, youth as gangsters and excesses by policemen. One cannot deny the existence of these vices, but this is just one of the faces of the society. The movie conveniently ignores or fails to focus on the other progressive areas. Perhaps, it was seen as hazardous to the storyline, background and global perception?
In this backdrop, all the recognition & awards world-over would only serve to worsen this. It would not just popularize the movie, but also strongly reinforce this negative stereotype. Its time we realized the damage being done?
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