It is only on seeing Delhi-6 that one realised that Slumdog creates the myth of Bollywood in a hall of mirrors by inverting, inflating and reversing it. Delhi-6 is about an Indian boy from a Diasporic family who escorts his grandmother to her home in Chandini Chowk. If Slumdog is about desire and information, Delhi-6 is about love and stupidity. Stupidity is what happens to knowledge when it is caught in the dark alleyways of superstition. America haunts the movie and it is caught in the visuality of exhibits and spectacles where suddenly the Statue of Liberty is ensconced next to Jama Masjid. The exhibits outside are but dreams within, where Chandini Chowk searches for the America of success and desire in all of us. In Slumdog it is the quiz, in Delhi-6 it is Indian Idol. Both demand a high spectatorship, yet both are dreams of individual mobility. One seeks information to escape the slum, one combines knowledge and the mobile-nubile body to escape the slum, the middle class slum of conservatism and intolerance.

In Boyle’s film, the slums of Bombay enact the myth of individual mobility. The tension is the tension of competition. The streets of Chandini Chowk recognise that individual success or freedom cannot come with mobility alone, it needs a collective change of mentalities. Two communities which have synergetically come together fall apart in a fight over a ‘black monkey’ which threatens all of them. The message is clear; one can’t be free till a community is also free. It is here that Delhi-6 brilliantly adds something that Danny Boyle does not understand. Despite the myth of information and the ersatz attempts to see the city as a knowledge society, Bollywood provides a theory of culture. Chandini Chowk with all its rituals reminds the worlds of Bombay and Bangalore. It is a warning that when you priviledge information over knowledge and disembed the two, a culture is emasculated. When a culture is threatened violence becomes the answer, the quick answer to difficult questions. Delhi-6 reminds you that culture is a slow thing, even stupid but it has possibilities. Culture is a whole, a commons in the way a pub culture or quiz culture are not. In a quiet way, a small film on Chandini Chowk tells Slumdog Millionaire it has not quite grasped Bollywood or India. Information can never substitute for the complexity of culture. Every stupid Indian knows that.

... contd.