Burden of a white man's false vision about India.

Rating: 1/10 (9 January 2009)

It is rather bizarre that this inane flick is currently at spot 205 in the IMDb top 250 list. It may be because these days it has become a fashion to trash the strong homogeneous cultures of developing economies. This is the reason why so many films are being made which try to belittle booming economies of Brazil, Russia, China and India. Slumdog Millionaire is one such film which is a half baked attempt to mix realism with social message. It fails on both counts. The biggest fault one can find with Danny Boyle's film is that it looks at poverty, poor kids only from an exploitation angle. This is the reason why so many negative scenes about poverty have been put in order to create a sensationalist approach. This can work wonders for those foreigners who have always looked upon India with their myopic eyes full of contempt. One can be sure that things would have been different if a solution angle had been applied to the film's narrative. The vision of Danny Boyle is so conceited that he feels that "Slumdog Millionaire" is his prerogative to suggest that India is nothing but a land of poor people where snake charmers merely rub shoulders with hungry elephants and crime is the only thing which pays. Slumdog Millionaire is a trashy film which will please only those who choose to ignore the real beauty of India. It is a sad fact that Danny Boyle has been able to fool people in the west. His real test will take place when his film is shown in Indian cinema halls where it would surely be trashed as a stupid white man's discriminatory vision of India's misery. It would meet the same fate as that of Mira Nair's "Salaam Bombay" when it bombed miserably at Indian box office after being shown for commercial distribution.