Reality is a dirty business for the West

It was Agent Seeley Booth, of the popular American tele show Bones, who motivated me to watch Slumdog Millionaire. Actually Booth's brother Jared wants to go India exploring. "India?" questions his lovely partner Dr Temperance Brennan. "Yeah, India you know Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire...'" explains Booth with a perfunctory wave of hand. So, despite being a reluctant movie watcher, I just couldn't bypass a dekko at that which had at long last elbowed out the fakirs, snake charmers, elephants, flying carpets of Hindustan from the western mind.
Eight Academy Awards, seven BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globes-the movie's caught and held the western imagination. I am no authority to comment on matters of adptation, screenplay, direction. Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor, Irfan Khan came across as consummate actors. But NO Agent Booth this isn't the India your brothers keen on exploring. The slums, the dirt, the squalor, the corruption and crime are not the defining landmarks of this country.
Poor Mr Bachchan drew a great deal of flak for panning the movie in his blog. He expressed his resentment at the projection of "India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and caus[ing]pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations." He was accused of suffering from the sour grape syndrome. A white man had realised what brown men dreamed of but failed to achieve - make a movie on an Indian theme, with Indian artistes and garner global recognition. Some of the sites went into an overdrove and charged Indian directors with churning out flimsy stuff, leaving the real issues to be screened by white men. Bachchan sahib was in fact labelled a 'no talent' riling against Danny Boyle's success.
I am not here to defend Mr Bachchan, he is still good at delivering knockout punches to his detractors, both homegrown and global. I am here to request the creative white junta to open their creative white eyes wide and not limit the identity of a nation to a movie, no matter how acclaimed. If it is the true picture that the western man finds exotic, well the fact remains that Slumdog Millionaire had a liberal dose of fluf to prop it up.
Regarding the charges of Indian cinema makers pandering to flimsy middle-class fanatsies, well somebody's certainly short on information about socially relevant cinema being produced in Hindi as well as regional languages. And come to think of it, reality is certainly not the hallmark of majority of American and western movies that light up global screens. Movies are a creative medium of entertainment and as it is with every creative medium it can be moulded to make you laugh, cry, inform, make a social statement or simply bore you to sleep. However, these are not works of academic authority whose veracity is unimpeachable. So, as Gurinder Chadha said "Slumdog Millionaire is a great film but the fact that it showed India in a way that the West wants to see India, in why that film was accepted by so many people."
The danger here is of the western mind falling prey to a parochial, self-cultivated, stereotypical image of a very vibrant nation. Reality doesn't mean poverty and violence alone, reality can deal with manifold issues, of which there is no derth in any nation and most certainly not in India.
Therefore, even as I watched, with great indulgence, Anil Kapoor and Danny Boyle's uninhibited expression of pleasure at the Academy Awards I felt a great protective surge for my motherland which had just acquired a new tattered, muddy and most foul identity in the western mind.