We’ve seen Bollywood dancers on an Oscar stage; two of the three nominees for Best Song being sung in a language nearly the entire audience couldn’t even identify let alone speak; those in the bevy of “India’s children” who spoke English translating questions into Marathi for the “kid from an actual slum” in a we’re-all-one-across-the-ocean-moment; and, of course, the most harmonious moment of India-is-England-is-India convergence since the founding of the East India Company. It’s an embarrassment of riches. But little about the slums so prominent in the title of the movie so celebrated.

Let me be clear: this is not a tirade against the movie in any way. It actually isn’t about the movie at all. It is about the one thing that it restored to our attention but that, somehow, isn’t being talked about: “slums”. Slumdog and the debates, protests, and celebrations around it, in equal measure, seem to beg a question: How do we, as Indians who are not Danny Boyle, think about the slum? How should we? Can Slumdog teach us a trick or two about our own backyards?

What Slumdog made me realise, more than anything else, is how much poverty has left the visual vocabulary of the new India. How distant it is. How unimaginable. How far one apparently has to go to see it or think about it. Put another way, how far so many of us had wittingly and unwittingly gone to not see it and not think about it until we paid a lot of money to see it lit-up on screen. How this movie was, for so many that live a ten-minute walk from their choice of slum, the first images of life inside a slum that they had seen. How for so many in South Delhi this movie was as foreign as for New Yorkers, and just as exotic, as surprising for its colour and happiness in the midst of obvious deprivation.

... contd.