A piece of Cinematic Feces.

Rating: 1/10 (12 February 2009)

This movie should rank as one of the worst movies of the decade if not the century! The script is painfully flawed and deliberately manipulative and full of clichés about India. It just takes those painfully little things the west thinks it knows of India (Slums, poverty, beggars, TajMahal, call centers, bollywood ) and paints it in the most horrifying way! The flaws in the script are so glaring and far from reality that it is preposterous to even consider this film for an Award worth its salt! For any Indian some of these things below are just laughable -
 While some riots break out, some kid dresses up as Lord RAM and postures while everyone else is running for his life. Ridiculous! And of course, the muslims are the victims!  While Jamaal knows whose photo is on a 100 dollor bill, he doesn't on an Indian Bill! Hello, this kid is taking photos of the tourists with an imported camera & hasn't seen ANY rupee note? (and FYI, All Indian Notes have Gandhi's portrait on them!!).  In India while English is spoken by those people whose medium of education is English (which is very small), Jamal and his friends who never went to school manage to speak English quite well!  Little children in a school study about the three musketeers and that too in English!
I can keep going on
Needless to say, this film has manipulated the poverty (that very much exists in India like most places in the world) in a very tasteless way to suit a western audience.
Consider this, at one scene when a driver beats up Jamal, he says "You wanted to see the real India. Here it is" and the woman replies "Well, here's the real America", pulling out a hundred-dollar bill for Jamal.
You'll find beggars and drug addicts on the streets of rich nations as well (I've seen many in Vancouver, LA, Boston and Atlanta). And how often do people there go around throwing hundred-dollar bills?
It is this twisted, deliberate attempt to glorify the ugly side of the Indian underbelly (again, which does exist to some extent) for the maker's own selfish gains, is just not acceptable.
My request for all those who saw the movie is - Don't type cast a vast civilization like India looking at a piece of cinematic Feces like "Slumdog Millionaire" and even worst please don't give it an Oscar!