Slumdog Millionaire

[dbc]

no but there a a mere confusion going on that many people think slumdog is a indian film and we're trying to clear that up

ah! mon capitan but it does matter to you... and I am disappointed that you hold Americans in such low regard...

 

[Super Falcon]

slum dog millioniare is not 100% indian investment have ben made by usa director in the film thats why it has won the oscar

 

[shchinese]

slum dog millioniare is not 100% indian investment have ben made by usa director in the film thats why it has won the oscar

but it does tell us the daily life in india: crime + hate + religious conflicts (Hindus against Muslims) + human rights abuse + corrpution.

great film

 

[Bull]

I watched the movie last night, its was brilliant and very confronting!
I hope the movie brings some changes in India for the betterment of slums.

I havnt watched it yet, i got the CD a month back though.

Well SD winning oscar proves one thing beyond doubt, S Asian still needs phirangs to get into oscar. Rahman's music in SD is way 'below paar' compared to his other works Roja, Taal, RDB, Dilli 6 to name a few.

 

[Incredible India]

A R Rahman should have got Oscar for this song... this is the best from him.

 

[s90]

Father slaps Slumdog star Azahar for not giving interview


MUMBAI: The dream run seems to be over for Azaharuddin Mohammed Ismail, the child star of Oscar-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire" with his father
slapping him for refusing to give interviews to media. ( Watch )

The 10-year-old child, who was plucked from a Mumbai slum to play the young Salim in the multiple-Oscar-winning movie, has been living amid constant media scrutiny since his return home from Los Angeles.

Tired after a long flight, Azahar wanted to go to sleep and refused to come out to oblige the media.

His father Mohammed Ismail wanting to make the most of the newly acquired celebrity status of his son, got infuriated and slapped him.

"I was being naughty. I did not want to give the interview as I was tired so he slapped me but he loves me," said Azhar.

Azhar returned back on Thursday to his shanty home in Mumbai's crowded slum after being in the media glare at the Oscar awards and later when he visited Disneyland.

He and Rubina, the young Salim and Latika in "Slumdog Millionaire", have shot to international fame post the phenomenal success of the film.


"Incredible India"

 

[duhastmish]

welcome my son welcome to machine!!!
truth is this oscar was just a mirage. truth is sour and sick, But i have no sympathy for these roaches, they are making our country lag behind. unedcated lazy uncivilized thrash!(to his father) Any ways s90 This had to come sometime. dream dont go on for ever. You have to wake up some time, and this is ground reality of the poors of india.

 

[Captain03]

ah! mon capitan but it does matter to you... and I am disappointed that you hold Americans in such low regard...

i dont hold them
they do that to themselves
i've lived in their society for over 12 years
and even they admit that their culture and knowledge is going backwards

 

[Neo]

LETTER FROM INDIA
The 'Slumdog' effect: Afflict the comfortable​

By Anand Giridharadas
February 26, 2009

MUMBAI: If India's well-to-do ran the world, the film that dominated the Academy Awards this week might simply have been called "Millionaire."

That aspect of the movie - about hope - the well-to-do liked. It was the other aspect, distilled in the word "Slumdog," that was so deflating.

The boom era now fading left two longings among India's globalized rich. The first is a desire for recognition by the West, through magazine covers and Booker Prizes and Grammys. The second is a desire to show the world the most sanitized representation of India, not the stereotypical India mired in poverty and degradation, but an India as pristine as the elite's own posh homes.

Sometimes international recognition and sanitization come in the same work, as in films like "Bride and Prejudice" and "Outsourced." But on other occasions, what might be called the Slumdog Bargain has imposed itself: world acclaim came at the cost of celebrating a vision of India that the elite didn't really want to see.

Until the triumphs of Oscar night won their grudging nods to its success, many affluent Indians were irked by "Slumdog Millionaire." They complained at cocktail parties, in the press and on television: There they go again, those Westerners, making this out to be a land of poverty or something! They found their voice in Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood's best-loved star, who ranted against "Slumdog" in a blog post that fast ricocheted through urban India.

"If SM projects India as Third World dirty under-belly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots," he wrote, "let it be known that a murky under-belly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations."

Supportive comments poured into the site from the elite pool of Indians with Internet access.

"They should realize that SM is not an Indian movie, but a means to sell out India to the world in order to make money," one user wrote. "The West enjoys trashing India as a land of smelly beggars and a land of corruption," said another.

The recognition-sanitization dilemma had struck a few months earlier, as well, when Aravind Adiga won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, "The White Tiger." He was praised in the local newspapers as yet another dazzling Indian novelist. But the book is not exactly a travel brochure. As he surveys India's class divides, he refers to millions of his compatriots as "half-baked," filled with "half-cooked ideas" by dismal schools. He writes of the degraded serving classes as "crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their 30s or 40s or 50s but still 'boys."'

Likewise, Arundhati Roy brought the nation great pride when she won the Booker in 1997 for "The God of Small Things." That is, until the newly affluent classes began to read her nonfiction writing and discovered her criticism of their heedless consumption and their blindness to the plight of the poor.

"There's a kind of insanity in the air and all of it held down by our mesmeric, pelvic-thrusting Bollywood movies," she told The Guardian newspaper in 2007. "The Indian middle class has just embarked on this orgy of consumerism."

Of course, the lifetime-achievement award in this category goes to V.S. Naipaul, a native of Trinidad who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. At the time, his Indian heritage was duly celebrated. Never mind his actual words about India: its "human futility," its "diseased society," its "intellectual depletion," its "evolution downwards, wasted body to wasted body."

The comfortable classes dismiss these ways of seeing India as exploitative, as taking a slice of reality and marketing it to the outside world as the whole. But the truth may be instead that the comfortable are ever less aware of what reality in this country really involves.

Newspapers, magazines and television stations have all but removed poverty from prominence. They give more space to mergers than corruption, to Slumdog than slums. It becomes possible as a New Indian to imagine that India's poverty is some jealous Westerner's invention and to fear that one's own rising status is threatened by it.

That seems to be ultimate anxiety of the well-to-do: not the fact of poverty itself, but what poverty says about them. Poverty complicates the respect they are given on business trips abroad; poverty taints their Harvard degrees.

It is telling that, in my four years of writing about India, no poor person has ever asked me not to write about poverty. Countless rich people have.

I once received an e-mail response to an article of mine from an Indian-born, MIT-trained economist who has lived in the United States, Europe and other parts of Asia.

"I was deeply pained and disappointed to catch a phrase, 'in this overwhelmingly destitute nation'," he said, in language that betrayed the personal, rather than political, nature of his complaint. "Why? Was it your phrase or did the editors insert it? What is the need to reinforce a stereotype of the West?"

But economic development is not Photoshop. There is a difference between making poverty history and making the mention of poverty history. Perhaps this is not part of the economics curriculum at MIT, but the World Bank says that 80 percent of Indians live on less than $2 daily.

The same self-regard was visible in Bachchan's musings. Unlike his counterpart Sean Penn, a heterosexual man who used his spotlight on Oscar night to call for the rights of those less included than he, Bachchan, like my economist interlocutor, seemed most concerned with his own psychic well-being. His words suggested a yearning to feel good about India that was more urgent to him than the change he might have achieved by saying other things: that half of Mumbai's people still live in slums; that half of India's children are still underfed; and that, whatever your taste in movies, something must be done.

Bachchan has done more than most for the poor, including battling polio. But his words on this occasion were about neediness more than the needy, and about Bachchan himself more than the gaunt millions who finance his career. And some visitors to his blog, dissenting from the rest, suggested that he reacquaint himself with reality by taking a short walk.

"If you think that SM movie did not show india as a developed country - you may have to step outside your opulent bungalow and have a look at how most people in india live - they live in villages and slums ignored by the government, celebrities and 'bollywood' filmmakers," a user called "Patriotic indian" wrote.

"Patriotism," the comment continued, "is not about living in an imaginary world but facing the real problems of India and doing something about it."

 

[Black Stone]

I haven't seen this film, any good?.

 

[Zovc]

I haven't seen this film, any good?.

Well it won 8 Oscars and has one of the highest investment-revenue ratio. Is it any good? i don't know you tell me.

 

[Black Stone]

Well it won 8 Oscars and has one of the highest investment-revenue ratio. Is it any good? i don't know you tell me.

I don't judge a film by awards or reviews, I have to watch it first inorder to conclude whether it is good or not.

Next time, just give an opinion, if not, then don't respond to my post.

 

[Khajur]

no but there a a mere confusion going on that many people think slumdog is a indian film and we're trying to clear that up

Its an indian film in the sense the its story is indian,its characters are indian and so are most of the technicians.I made my point.

Now its up to the natural right & own sense of responsibility for our pakistani friends to prove how an Oscar wining film like slumdog isnt really indian as it made out to be and deprive wily indians taking any positive mileage out of it.

 

[Neo]

Caught on film: India ‘not shining’ ​

Arundhati Roy – Exclusive for Dawn.com
Sunday, 01 Mar, 2009

'Slumdog Millionaire' child actor Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail is served his dinner by his mother Shamim Begum, right, in his home in a slum in Bandra, suburban Mumbai, India, Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009. The child stars of the Oscar-winning “Slumdog Millionaire” have returned to India to a chaotic, but rousing, heroes' welcome, following their appearance on the red carpet at the recent Oscar ceremony, where the movie “Slumdog Millionaire,” a tale of hope amid adversity set in Mumbai, was awarded eight Oscars, including best picture and best director for Danny Boyle. – AP Photo​

The night before the Oscars, in India, we were re-enacting the last few scenes of Slumdog Millionaire. The ones in which vast crowds of people – poor people – who have nothing to do with the game show, gather in the thousands in their slums and shanty towns to see if Jamal Malik will win. Oh, and he did. He did. So now everyone, including the Congress Party, is taking credit for the Oscars that the film won!

The party claims that instead of India Shining it has presided over India 'Achieving'. Achieving what? In the case of Slumdog, India's greatest contribution, certainly our political parties’ greatest contribution is providing an authentic, magnificent backdrop of epic poverty, brutality and violence for an Oscar-winning film to be shot in. So now that too has become an achievement? Something to be celebrated? Something for us all to feel good about? Honestly, it's beyond farce.

And here’s the rub: Slumdog Millionaire allows real-life villains to take credit for its cinematic achievements because it lets them off the hook. It points no fingers, it holds nobody responsible. Everyone can feel good. And that’s what I feel bad about.

So that’s about what’s not in the film. About what’s in it: I thought it was nicely shot. But beyond that, what can I say other than that it is a wonderful illustration of the old adage, ‘there's a lot of money in poverty’.

The debate around the film has been framed – and this helps the film in its multi-million-dollar promotion drive – in absurd terms. On the one hand we have the old 'patriots' parroting the line that "it doesn't show India in a Proper Light' (by now, even they’ve been won over thanks to the Viagra of success). On the other hand, there are those who say that Slumdog is a brave film that is not scared to plum the depths of India 'not-shining'.

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. It really doesn’t deserve the passion and attention we are lavishing on it. It's a silly screenplay and the dialogue was embarrassing, which surprised me because I loved The Full Monty (written by the same script writer). The stockpiling of standard, clichéd, horrors in Slumdog are, I think, meant to be a sort of version of Alice in Wonderland – ‘Jamal in Horrorland’. It doesn't work except to trivialize what really goes on here. The villains who kidnap and maim children and sell them into brothels reminded me of Glenn Close in 101 Dalmatians.

Politically, the film de-contextualises poverty – by making poverty an epic prop, it disassociates poverty from the poor. It makes India’s poverty a landscape, like a desert or a mountain range, an exotic beach, god-given, not man-made. So while the camera swoops around in it lovingly, the filmmakers are more picky about the creatures that
inhabit this landscape.

To have cast a poor man and a poor girl, who looked remotely as though they had grown up in the slums, battered, malnutritioned, marked by what they’d been through, wouldn't have been attractive enough. So they cast an Indian model and a British boy. The torture scene in the cop station was insulting. The cultural confidence emanating from the obviously British 'slumdog' completely cowed the obviously Indian cop, even though the cop was supposedly torturing the slumdog. The brown skin that two share is too thin to hide a lot of other things that push through it. It wasn’t a case of bad acting – it was a case of the PH balance being wrong. It was like watching black kids in a Chicago slum speaking in Yale accents.

Many of the signals the film sent out were similarly scrambled. It made many Indians feel as though they were speeding on a highway full of potholes. I am not making a case for verisimilitude, or arguing that it should not have been in English, or suggesting anything as absurd as 'outsiders can never understand India.' I think plenty of Indian filmmakers fall into the same trap. I also think that plenty of Indian filmmakers have done this story much, much better. It's not surprising that Christian Colson – head of Celedor, producers of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ – won the Oscar for the best film producer. That's what Slumdog Millionaire is selling: the cheapest version of the Great Capitalist dream in which politics is replaced by a game show, a lottery in which the dreams of one person come true while, in the process, the dreams of millions of others are usurped, immobilizing them with the drug of impossible hope (work hard, be good, with a little bit of luck you could be a millionaire).

The pundits say that the appeal of the film lies in the fact that while in the West for many people riches are turning to rags, the rags to riches story is giving people something to hold on to. Scary thought. Hope, surely, should be made of tougher stuff. Poor Oscars. Still, I guess it could have been worse. What if the film that won had been like Guru – that chilling film celebrating the rise of the Ambanis. That would have taught us whiners and complainers a lesson or two. No?

 

[qsaark]

slum dog millioniare is not 100% indian investment have ben made by usa director in the film thats why it has won the oscar

Actually you may be right. I am a big time fan of 'Art Movies' especially from Shyam Benegal and Satyajit Ray. I know these two directors are at least as much as or perhaps even better than a number of Oscar winning American or European Directors. However, only Ray was awarded an 'honorary' Oscar. None of their movies ever won Oscar. And I can say it for sure that not one not two but many of their movies were made on the similar issues as the Slumdog Millionaire, and were made batter, yet never won Oscar. The only reason that comes to my mind is because they were not by US/European directors. However, it appears that things are changing now. I am sure, in coming years, more Indian Directors, Writers and Lyricists will win Oscar. And they should because they are good.