Now comes the sleight of hand because Bollywood has never merged the two. What is Boyle’s procedure for merging the two myths of mobility into one story?

Firstly, he speeds up and compresses time. The movie which is a triptych of parts — the child boy in the slum, the adolescent boy, and the young man— speeds up time. What was a scrap book reads internally like flip-book. Space is now read as time. The second move is a more complex one. Boyle argues that the knowledge of the slum, the little things that happen to you, the visualness of urban life, the primers that you read, are “information”. It also creates a subplot where the police are suspicious of the hero’s skills. It is under interrogation — which is the only quiz slum kids undergo with the police — that Dev Patel explains how he could answer the questions. The pairing of the two forms of questioning is powerful. It reminds one that interrogation in a police station is also a quiz, and secondly that a quiz intellectually can be as tough as a police interrogation. Both make you sweat it out and in both the stake is survival. Where Boyle is shaky is when he regards the slum as a repository of information. Maybe his message is that we should hybridise knowledge and information. The body as physicality no longer provides the skills because globally the body is the locus of desire, not of labour or physical power.

... contd.