Two films in recent times have sought to capture the imagination of the city; Slumdog Millionaire and Delhi-6. The first in its English version is a stunning hit and the other has been met by a quiet silence. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog is a western attempt to read Bollywood. It is a mythical reading of Bollywood. Myth seeks to reconcile fundamental tensions using any set of symbols. What Slumdog does is to weave Bollywood and Hollywood and it is this that makes it fascinating. What it says about poverty, violence in itself is banal.

The semiotic task it performs can be seen as a set of tables. Firstly, there is the Bollywood myth of the slum where goodness by itself is self-defeating. As a turf subject to temporariness, the slum is always prone to the tyranny of gangs, cops and politicians. It takes the machismo, the physical violence of the hero to break through. There is however a second myth of the city emerging. It derives from the intellectual and inventive power of the Diaspora which brings with it the same idealism but a better set of skills from the world of management and engineering.

The second myth was actually captured by the TV show ‘Kaun Banega Crorpati’. It centres on a quiz as the rule game of an information society. The skills of the slum don’t always work in the intellectual akhada of the quiz. Danny Boyle takes the myth of the slum and the quiz and blends them into one story of a slum boy who makes it big in a quiz game. To make it realistic and more competitive he makes the quiz master played by Anil Kapoor a tougher, seedier and hostile creature. This is a character contemptuous of any chai wala who can even dream of entering a quiz.

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