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Feel vindicated to quite an extent since some of us had been discussing in much the same vein at NG . Great analysis.
“Middle India is cock-a-hoop over its surrogate triumph at the Academy Awards. The eight Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire — three of these going to a couple of true blue Indians — for a romanticised Dickensian tale of a vile Fagin, exploited children and an uncaring system comes as the perfect stardust for a country seeking to gloss over the cruel realities of its 21st-century poverty and joblessness, a predicament made worse by the deepening global recession.
Thus, entire front pages have been given over to the delirium of watching the Indian slumdog arrive on the international stage, never mind that the portrayal is as savage as you can get in an oddly prettified plot.
That it hasn’t touched a national raw nerve is because middle class Indians have begun to take such things in their stride; they are no longer affronted by the outside view of the degrading poverty that afflicts the overwhelming majority of their countrymen.
For an America that is experiencing what is possibly the worst recession in its history since the Great Depression, Slumdog Millionaire offers some relief from its own lethal cocktail of unemployment, unaffordable food, homelessness and increasing debt.
Americans who are mesmerised by the cinematic kitsch of Mumbai’s underbelly are clearly seeking palliatives to the horror stories tumbling out of the Byzantine world of investment bankers who have been the cause of their undoing.”
Read more from link. Its interesting. Must quote the last paragraph for those not inclined to click.
“It’s not surprising that the euphoria over Slumdog Millionaire is limited to the mainstream media and the upper classes. Collections in India show that the movie hasn’t been a hit, and its Hindi version almost a flop. If Dharavi is cheering, it’s only because two of its tiny denizens who were used to portray the cruel heart of poverty in India, were dolled up and sent to Kodak Theatre in LA for the big night.
But Americans will continue to be enticed by the false promise of the slumdog phenomenon.
Paul Smith, the executive producer of Slumdog Millionaire and chairman of Celador Films, is apparently all set to revive the most popular game show in television history: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? which was aired on ABC from 1999 to 2002. Millions of viewers watched the show on which the India version was modelled.Some reports have it that Slumdog was just the trailer to bringing the main show back in the US sometime soon. “
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these individuals who really think MNIK worked seriously needs to throw water on their face
Karan Johar should just zip his ...
If I made 1 movie in 4 years and the movie doesnt make profit i wud be cross.
If I made ...
That was a BOI ploy doga.rnbdj didnt beat sik opening week.They were with 42 cr for rnbdj for 2 weeks ...
Only thing SIK beat Rab ne was the 3 day Weekend,
28 cr vs 25 cr.
Hype for SIK was really ...
I see them every year in Manali.
But recently a few have re-appeared in my town. 
Housefull ATTBB,
BOI claimed 43 cr for SIK and 45 cr for RNBDJ..Then they cgnaged it to 39 cr for SIK ...
This year Akshay will give a reply to his distractors. While Karan's friends have started deserting his camp (Read Farha ...
Ihab
its ok.i did not find lakshya engaging enough.i liked it in parts.It was too slow and boring in second half. 
" Ihab,since you like Hrithik, would you like to elaborate on you watching Krrish 16 times in Theatres . "
Lol, ...
From being most common bird to their total disappearance from cities within a very short span of time (last 10-15 ...
Som 28 February 2009
09:53:07 pm
Slumdog: Dilemma of a new India
After its sweeping win at the Oscars last Sunday, Slumdog Millionaire seems like the movie everyone wants, and perhaps needs. It has all the
ingredients of escapist fare from the Great Depression — a populist hero who overcomes all odds to get the girl and the money.
There’s an added element of self-congratulation for the West: by seeing this movie, you can see India without getting your hands dirty or offending your nose, and cheer it on. Cinderella didn’t walk through tenements and sectarian violence to reach her prince. But in this fairy tale, a concession must be made to modern realities. Dev Patel is symbolic of India here and now, fulfilling its wildest economic aspirations while being conscious of the darkest aspects of social decay and despair.
If we follow the metaphor to its logical conclusion, India will get the money and the girl by rising above its slums. Perhaps that’s why Slumdog has created an uneasy reaction in Mumbai and the rest of India.
Read the rest from HERE
Som 1 March 2009
12:17:17 am
A Slum Is A Slum
julie 1 March 2009
04:27:21 am
“Rising above isn’t the same as solving. Many well-born educated Indians have looked westward for a long time, which is easier than looking inward. They know more about the streets of London and New York than the teeming lanes of the ghettos in their own city. This is true, of course, among rich elites everywhere, not just in South Asia. Watching Dev cross the social line is triumphant, but it reminds you that there is a line. (Obama crossed the racial line in triumph, also, but notice how much heat his Attorney General, Eric Holder, took when he suggested in less than polite terms that America needs to be more honest and courageous about the whole problem of race.) “
julie 1 March 2009
04:29:11 am
“Having been made on a shoestring budget, Slumdog managed to outgross any number of big-budget Hollywood films. Last week, it ranked fifth on the US box office while its nearest Oscar rival, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was no longer in the top ten. Brad Pitt, being a megastar, has pulled his film to $122 million, compared to Slumdog’s $98 million, but is that really competitive? “
Som 1 March 2009
04:48:26 am
Incidentally SDM has crossed $100 Million in US and still going strong. I would not be surprised if it adds another $40-50 Million from here on.No one would have ever expected SDM to come this far, tremendous achievement so to speak.
Som 2 March 2009
10:38:16 pm
Arundhati Roy on Slumdog Slumdog Millionaire does not puncture the myth of ‘India shining’— far from it. It just turns India ‘not-shining’ into another glitzy item in the supermarket. As a film, it has none of the panache, the politics, the texture, the humour, and the confidence that both the director and the writer bring to their other work
manoj16_391 3 March 2009
12:38:33 am
Nice article on Slumdog:
Slumdog divide
Slumdog Millionaire has created a deep divide among India’s urbangentsia where none should exist. What’s at issue in this case is really not so much
the merits or otherwise of Danny Boyle’s movie. What the hoo-ha is really about is India’s poverty, and our reaction to that poverty particularly when it is exposed to a western audience.
There have been, and are, a number of prominent Indians, from Nargis to Amitabh Bachchan, who have felt that the cinematic depiction of India’s poverty, particularly in films which enjoy foreign viewership, is like washing our dirty laundry in public, making known a terrible family secret, such as incest or child abuse. Yes, of course these unfortunate things do happen, and sometimes in what otherwise are the best of families. But must one haul them out into the open, bringing shame and disrepute on the family? This seemed to be the attitude of ‘Mother India’ Nargis when, years ago, she accused Satyajit Ray of ‘exporting’ India’s poverty through films like Pather Panchali, which arguably is one of the finest and most moving films ever to come out of this country.
More recently, Bachchan, in a blog that sparked off the current round of controversy on India’s poverty, voiced similar sentiments regarding Slumdog Millionaire. Bachchan seems to find the portrayal of India’s poverty gross and distasteful, rather like cracking racist jokes in front of a racially disadvantaged person, or breaking wind at the dining table. Unpleasant things, like racism, flatulence and poverty do, regrettably, exist. But must we have the bad taste to discuss or exhibit them, more so when guests are present? Wouldn’t it be better all around, more polite and socially correct, to pretend that these awkward things just don’t exist? And of course if you can afford to donate Rs 50 lakh to a temple which you visit with your son and your ‘manglik’ daughter-in-law to be, when you make as much money if not more from commercial endorsements, including an ad for what is billed to be the world’s most expensive suiting material, as you do from your movie roles, poverty must seem like a really insensitive joke or a particularly nasty expulsion of gastric wind.
On the other side of the Slumdog divide are those for whom poverty is not a joke in bad taste, or a social gaffe but a life-threatening, socially transmitted disease, like AIDS. And, as in the case of AIDS, its exposure and the enhancing of public awareness about it is a moral responsibility on the part of not just those who are victims of it but on the part of all of us. Again, like AIDS, poverty is not a crime; what is a crime is the wilful perpetration of poverty by suppressing knowledge about it and consequently forestalling efforts to combat it.
Poverty, like AIDS, is not shameful. What is shameful is that more than 60 years after independence poverty continues to exist in our midst, in the midst of India Shining, and India Winning, and India Rising, like a curable, or least preventable, but chronically neglected disease. The reaction against Slumdog Millionaire and other works of its kind that have shown us the face of our disowned poverty is rooted in a misplaced sense of shame. What we are or ought to be ashamed of is not our poverty but of our attempts to wish it away, to sweep it under the carpet, to decry all depictions of it as commercial exploitation and social and cultural voyeurism.
This is why people like Bachchan are angry about Slumdog Millionaire. Not because it shows the world how pitifully poor we are (actually, far from being pathetic stereotypes, the ’slumdogs’ in the film are feisty, irrepressible individuals fighting against all odds the system that seeks to victimise them) but because, inadvertently, it has revealed to us through our reactions to the film how culpable we are in the continuance of poverty.
The real Slumdog divide is not between the haves and the have-nots; it’s between the hopers and the hope-nots: those who hope to cure the disease of poverty by first of all recognising its reality, and those who, dismissing it as a hopeless case, would bury it alive by pretending it didn’t exist.