Around 1890, Sigmund Freud threw a red oriental rug on a rather short divan upholstered with springs and horsehair stuffing in his clinic. It was the original couch of confessions, where Anna O and Rat Man revealed themselves in the safety of pseudonyms. Now, the confessional is for the couch potato and the setting is dramatically different. In a television studio, under spotlights, life becomes a game, played for a million dollars. You sit on a swivelling chair opposite Amitabh Bachchan and Computerji and let on your life’s little details, something subjective amid those objective-type questions. America — from firefighters and waitresses to NFL players and carpenters — happily takes part in The Moment of Truth and answers extremely personal and embarrassing questions. They confess about cheating on their spouses, about lying that the wedding ring is diamond when it is just zirconium and how they still hate their dads and how their moms abandoned them — and walk away with a few thousand dollars. Danny Boyle’s Golden Globe-winning Slumdog Millionaire, an adaptation of Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A, taps into this pop-culture phenomenon; reality television’s most cost-effective format where ordinary lives are played out in an episode and advertisements and revenues swell. 

Slumdog Millionaire is about a boy from Dharavi who is on the verge of winning the television game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The question that troubles the game’s producers is: how did Jamal (in the novel he is Ram Mohammed Thomas, the literary counterpart of Bollywood’s Amar Akbar Anthony, but screenplay writer Simon Beaufoy seems to have decided not to complicate things or to give in to the Indian love for metaphors) know the answers to all the questions. The novel, and the movie, is the slum boy’s confession. In explaining how he knew the answer to each question, the story of his life unspools.

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