The story is universal, but it could only have been made in Mumbai. The sights are ours — the ragged roofs of the largest shanty-town in Asia spread below us, and the twisted, narrow lanes of those slums. The sounds are ours — the slumdog’s lost girl-friend in a ‘kotha’ dancing to an effete dancemaster’s tune, ‘Ringa Ringa’, is fabulously Rahman. The conventions we’ve long associated with Bollywood potboilers are all there — lost-and-found brothers, a brief-lasting but ever-loving mother, the good guys and the bad ones. Heck, there’s even an item song, right at the end, like all good self-respecting Bollywood flicks.

But it’s Indian in a much more crucial way. In the way it waves the flag for emotion. In the way it upholds warm feelings over form. In the way it trumps commerce, and holds aloft romance. Slumdog Jamal tells the inspector who’s just finished shocking him that he’s not in it for the millions. He only entered the game show in the hope that he will find his lost love. This is a dilwala who will go to any lengths to get back his dulhaniya. That is ours, always ours.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com