The second myth: that SM is about the aspiration that animates India’s urban underclass today. It isn’t: the central point is that the boy that wins millions wants to be on the show basically so that the girl that’s disappeared can find him, not because it’s a long-held desire. Yes, the various and diverse areas of illegal or non-permanent housing we call our slums are vibrant places where entrepreneurship of one sort or another has taken root, and where people increasingly feel connected to the rest of their city. This movie is not about that. We may want it to be, but it isn’t.

The third myth: this is “poverty porn”; it romanticises or exploits poverty for the happy, well-fed Western moviegoer. This isn’t a new fear: we’ve used it against our best movies often enough in the past. And, as David Bordwell has pointed out, it isn’t unique to India: Italians in the 1950s used it against Neorealist cinema, for example. And again, the argument is even less applicable than usual: nowhere does Anthony Mantle’s camera try and make squalor beautiful; if some shots are spectacular, like the aerial shot of the children running through the slum, that’s not because of how they’ve been treated. This is the kind of argument made by those in societies acutely nervous of how they’re viewed, jostling for place. Scandinavians don’t complain that hyper-realist Dogme movies present them as a people lost in a perpetual dusk, wandering around without make-up, too gloomy for background music.

... contd.