And this year, for the first time since 1982, Academy voters thought about India. Just as Gandhi continues to teach us our history on Doordarshan, every Independence Day and Gandhi Jayanti, while simultaneously implying that basically everything interesting in India happened before 1948, Slumdog Millionaire will be with us forever in some avatar, lighting up movie channels, providing metaphors for political commentators, subtly fixing impressions about India for a decade’s worth of ordinary people living beyond India’s shores. And hence, for once, the self-conscious, angry mutter might actually be justified: you looking at us? What, Mr Oscar, is all the fuss about?

By now, everyone and his blogger cousin have weighed in on the subject. Movies, like the weather, are complex subjects but about which all of us feel authorised to have an opinion. And, yes, now there is something to be explained: how opinion can apparently be so very divided between many in India and those in the rest of the world.

A clue is that a lot of that divided opinion seems, on the face of it, unconnected to the actual movie. Consider the four biggest myths, two common among those who like the movie, two among those who despise it. Myth No 1, common in reviews from small-town American newspapers: that SM is a “feel-good” movie. Am I the only one to whom this is inexplicable? SM includes child prostitution, begging rings, maiming and torture, and ends with the suicide-murder of one of the main characters. This isn’t Billy Elliot. Yes, it ends with kids dancing on a railway platform. But if that is all it takes, it means that we desperately want a feel-good movie, not that this one really is.

... contd.