Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog millionaire is one of those movies that you would be hard pressed to dislike. Enough has been said about the central theme of hope and determination and a single minded pursuit of the objective to survive being so redemptive for the audience that they cannot help themselves feeling optimistic most of the screen-time. I think the music had the most important contribution to that effect the movie has had. The music soars and leaps and segues off here and there, there are powerful heart warming beats strewn throughout the picture and a certain anthem like quality to most of the songs. That is hard to dislike and when the musician is A.R.Rehman, you aren't really left in doubt. Afterall this is a man who has given us the transcendental time and time again. 

If you ask me, the movie wouldn't have felt half as good if it weren't for the absolutely riveting score.

Before going to the theaters, I was certain that the movie would be instructive in its vantage view point of what India looks like. I expected to not like the movie storyline too much. I was pleasantly surprised and might I add that even though Dev Patel's characterisation of Jamal Malik, although not true to how such a character would carry himself, talk or react, he was adequate to the requirements of the movie, which, although it was focussed on the travails of three kids, is about much more than just a tragic, docu sob story. It is essentially about hope and survival. It tells you that even in the most despicable settings imaginable, people do not just wait to die. They fight and they labor. Everyone wants to climb the ladder and India is a country where there aren't enough ladders to climb.

So, from a documentary movie perspective what did Slumdog show:

1) Sanitation and Public Health is non-existent in the sloven settings at the slums. People use makeshift toilets that are excruciatingly unhygienic and have to pay to visit the loo.

2) The poor in this country are madly in love with Amitabh Bachchan.

3) Hindu Muslim riots in the winters of 1992 destroyed a lot of lives and drove thousands of kids onto the streets.

4) There are gangs that operate a whole begging business wherein small kids are let lose on the streets of Mumbai, where they beg for money. Because beggars with deformity are considered an especially high earning category, there are some ruffians who actually blind healthy kids to secure good money.

5) Child prostitution and Paedophilia is rampant in the country. Girls are forced into the business as soon as they hit puberty and its a cesspool which they literally never escape from.

This movie, as I said earlier, is about survival. These are three kids with very little going for them. Yet they make it to adult life, which in itself seems an accomplishment given their harsh environs and total lack of any support mechanism. They first lose their families, next they are forced into the beggar world, the girl is forced into prostitution and Salim even murders. Yet they survive.