The Beauty of a Slumdog

Slumdog Millionare is not a happy movie. The plot, when taken in its entirety, is of course the "feel good" formula of decades: the poorest of the poor born into the cruel world of poverty, violence and exploitation, against all odds, emerges a winner. And yet, barring the last five minutes, the film hit a little too close to home. It shoved aside the glitter of the Bollywood elite and slashed through the thick, comfortable layer of middle-class Monsoon weddings to reveal the very worst conditions of urban humanity: the forgotten India.
To American audiences the movie will represent the triumph of the human spirit. And perhaps to this end, Slumdogís many Oscar nominations will prove fruitful. For one far removed from the reality that the movie portrays - Salim's opportunism and his final act of sacrifice, Jamal's victory and his stolen romance with Latika - elicits a strong feeling of pride. Like the characters in a vividly real western, the audience roots for the spunky underdog. But for one such as myself, an Indian firmly ensconced in middle-class comfort and blinkered with the deliberate ignorance of la vie en rose, the ugly truth brings a sickening tug of guilt to the pit of the stomach. This is the India we read about, talk about, and yet, the India we have forsaken. These are the very evils we write off as irreparable as we slowly sip a glass of Kingfisher's best.
When I watched Slumdog Millionaire, I was horrified. Horrified at my own blindness. Horrified that up until this point, all I had seen was a hazy unpleasantness in the distance that I chose to ignore for material pleasures. But as I watched, I also felt my heart swell and soar with a feeling greater than happiness. And this is what places Slumdog above the myriad Indian art films about the very same thing. It is what will probably win Danny Boyle his Oscar and separate the west's view of India from their view of, say, Darfur. It teaches us that the world is not as our mothers told us as they put us to sleep, but that the moments of pure, untainted beauty that can be snatched from its forbidding depths are better than any fairytale sung to us in secure warmth of our beds.