A.  They don’t want to talk about poverty

B.  They can’t fit in 4 song/dance numbers

C.  No Indian idol will make a fine Slumdog

D.  All of the above

In the opening chase scene of  Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, two tubby policemen are running after two boys through slush and slum. The camera, on occasion, is positioned at the muzzle of a stray dog. From the point of view of an unwanted dog, the world feels alien and fetid, yet familiar and fragrant. It becomes a metaphor for a movie that, from start to finish and both on and off screen, has erupted into a riot of color, contrast and controversy. Top Indian cine producers now whimper and whine over Slumdog’s glory.

Indians in India and in the diaspora have reacted to Slumdog’s riproaring success with a sweet and sour taste in the mouth. “How come we didn’t think of that, yaar? This is our story, man, but they got in the queue before us? Agaaaain?” Now imagine Russell Peters’ bulging eyeballs. He might say: “They already took our diamonds. Now they want our bloody Oscar too?” 

 Indians are competitive. They’re hardworking. The last thing they imagined was being upstaged by someone else in Mumbai, on what was their mega movie turf–and that too by the Brits who ran away, over a century ago, with India’s Koh-i-Noor diamond.

 For a layperson such as I, who claims merely to be a consumer of a good story tastefully told, only a handful of Indian moviemakers have ever made movies worth watching. With the exception of Satyajit Ray from Kolkata, K. Balachander from Chennai and a few others, Indians moviemakers don’t believe in making a barebones movie to simply tell a story; until now, their raison d’etre has been to mega-sell every story. A simple narrative requires deep honesty. And honesty often requires soul-searching and, to a degree, a dose of detachment.

For Bollywood’s famed directors, digging around for an honest story may have involved grappling with and coming to terms with their own hypocrisy. At the traffic light in many of India’s cities, slum girls weave between vehicles doing cartwheels. As soon as the light turns green, the girls worm their way out fiercely from the charging traffic, a sight that makes one’s stomach churn. Will these children retreat in time? They do so, without fail, every time. Visiting Indians like me heave a sigh of relief and then sit back in our cocoon of air-conditioned comfort. In a fraction of a second, the incident is forgotten. The inequity and the iniquity of the situation recede as the traffic light turns green.

 It’s obvious, then, why the novelty of the creative ways of the poor never struck a chord in the local moviemaker, especially one who was raised and dyed in the culture. While Slumdog’s British director perceived (on his very first trip to India) the heart and the pluck of these forgotten children, Bollywood had already relegated them to a compartmentalized world where orphaned rag dolls, open latrines, hookers and transsexuals occupy Platform 9-3/4, a station in life that no one enters but the lowliest of Muggles. That is how the members of a striated, self-absorbed society in post-colonial India deal with corruption, inequity and human suffering. As Pavan K Verma describes so eloquently in Be Indian, Indians “are a pragmatic people, naturally amoral in their outlook.”

 So the self-anointed upper class won’t talk about the seaminess of the slums of poor India. That is like talking about cancer or other stigmatized illnesses in the family, an anathema to people from eastern cultures. It’s there. Why talk about it? What of it? It’s the same hypocrisy that shows the Indian storyteller dropping broad hints about sex even though sex, judging from the population, is a predominant pastime in Indian life. Indian Cinema alludes to the joy of sex in its songs and in its wildly suggestive drenched choli (equivalent of a wet T-shirt) dance sequences in the rain. The meaning of the lyrics of a Tamil song of the last decade goes something like this. “Sweetheart, an ant has entered my bodice and is presently wreaking havoc on my body. Why won’t you?” See the subtlety?

 In a system where precision is taboo and suggestion is a virtue, honesty constantly ends up getting the boot. But don’t think Indians are incapable of candor. Director Satyajit Ray’s landmark film, Pather Panchali (“Song of the Little Road”, 1955) told the truth about the struggles of ordinary people. It featured mostly amateur actors, and was made by an inexperienced crew and it won the "Best Human Document" award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, establishing Ray’s place in the international silver screen firmament. Ray never catered to the notion of mass appeal; instead, he wove masterful stories about the human condition in India before and after the British Raj.

   Ray was celebrated for the truth in his stories. Vikas Swarup, the author of Q & A, the book on which Slumdog is based, addresses the same  issue of truth and integrity regarding the quiz in his work. “The toughest part is to ensure the questions are integral to the story. The readers should not feel that because of the questions I have contrived the story. Readers should feel that because of his life story he has been able to answer the questions,” he says to the Rediff columnist in a 2005 interview.

 How hard is it for India’s moviemakers to offer the integrity that Swarup strugged with, albeit in another medium? Instead, they would rather deliver a mishmash of many elements for mass consumption with box office gains as the measure of self-worth. As a result of misplaced priorities, the best of Indian cinema has languished.

 Kannathil Muthamittal (“A Peck on the Cheek”, 2002), a deftly woven tale–by acclaimed South Indian director Mani Ratnam–about a child born in strife-torn Sri Lanka to parents of Sri Lankan and Indian origin swept away key awards at international festivals: Best Feature Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival, Audience Award for Best Feature Film at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles, Audience Award, Jury Award and Special Award at the Film Fest New Haven, and Best International Film at the Westchester Film Festival, among others. But the film never reached the Oscar stage. Instead Devdas was put up for the Oscars in the same year (2003,) a blockbuster by Indian standards that ultimately went bust under Oscar scrutiny. The committee in Mumbai didn’t learn its lesson after Lagaan fizzled at the Oscars in 2002. When will it learn that a moving story of universal significance will win over sizzle, ostentation and masala (blend of many elements).

Former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Shashi Tharoor, often refers to the Indian ideal of pluralism as a thali in his talks and writings. In India, all ethnic, cultural and religious identities exist under the umbrella of an Indian identity much like the thali at an Indian restaurant–a large stainless steel plate with a number of distinctive dishes served in different bowls.  A majority of Indian movies have dished up the thali concept with ingredients that don’t mix rather than a one-course fare. And thus, great art never emerged from this bed of masala.

  An Indian director filming Slumdog would have cut to maudlin song and sentiment in the rain scene when the three slum kids have to find a home inside a broken pipe for the night. The first embrace of Jamaal and Latika would have morphed into a dream sequence in the Himalayas. That would have offered us a peek at Latika’s Navel and, oh, her Runway Leg. How brilliant that Boyle should boil down the quintessential element of Indian cinema into an enchanting dance number at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus as the credits roll. 

For now people of Indian origin around the globe are rejoicing in the attention India has got through Slumdog. As Pavan Verma maintains, “Nothing unites Indians more than success, just as nothing brings out their natural fractiousness more than failure.” Indians are ecstatic that genius music composer and director, A. R. Rahman, is finally getting his due. But as is typical in India, some in Rahman’s hometown of Chennai are already nitpicking over his unimpressive work of the last decade saying that Rahman’s early scores were much more deserving of international attention. 

I know what tugged at my heartstrings in Slumdog: the bird’s eye view of Bombay’s shanty towns, the lens hovering over the head of  a boy squatting over an open latrine, the view of the dusty countryside through the shaft of sunlight between two dirty train compartments, the upside down shot of Jamal inside the restroom. These were strange, raw moments–no rocket science cinematography in the view of experts, no doubt–but visceral in the experience of many moviegoers. 

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ may not have deserved an Oscar nomination. Yet, its searing honesty and its subsequent victories may be the best thing that happened to Indian cinema. It is also a measure of how, in art, honesty has to be the main color on one’s palette knife even if the brush strokes are crude and inelegant. As the Indians moviemakers are learning, it’s time to zoom in on the snout of a stray slum dog because only he can smell the truth close to the ground.