Slumdog: A Case Of International Schizophrenia

“You will have to be a cynic or a professional spoilsport to play down Slumdog’s unprecedented success story at the Oscars”-so proclaimed an otherwise uninteresting article in the otherwise uninteresting Edit page of the otherwise uninteresting newspaper called HT. Now that’s some real tough choice, I told myself, considering neither of the two terms(actually there can be a third too-“Professional Cynic”) portray you in good light in this season of heightened celebration of anything and everything, even remotely related to SLUMS. All of a sudden, slums have acquired a whole new aura about themselves. Today, slums are chic, slums are swank. Never have the slums been so prominent in public imagination as now, and all of this courtesy a multiple Academy Award winner sub-average movie called...........You already know it unless you have slept through the past two months or you reside in a tribal village in Mozambique with no TV or newspaper, not to mention an internet connection.

I know, I might be raising a million eye-brows with this(that is if somehow, just somehow a million actually care to read this space). Had I been a celebrity, I might have been even forced to retract my statement like Mr. AB did. But unfortunately, I am not. So, I can carry on unabashedly with my not-so-popular views on something as ubiquitous as SM without running the risk of my effigies being burnt by hardcore slum-loyalists. You see, sometimes it does pay to be a common man.

In simple terms, SM happens to be one of the most mediocre movies that I have come across. Its storyline is perhaps as much convincing as the tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Cinematically, it might be better than say, Naksha. As far as that track called “Jai Ho” is concerned, any Rehman fan worth his salt would tell you where that song would come if a hierarchical list of his compositions is made. As if this was not enough, you also get to witness one of the most amusing pieces of choreography ever filmed on the big screen. Talk about stretching the limits. SM truly does it, and that too again and again. And please don’t even start me on that “Hoping against Hope!” philosophy preached by the movie. Every single Bollywood movie of the 80s does that, where the hero gets the heroine in the end despite all the odds. In nutshell, SM has all the ingredients of a just-another-movie but thanks to media dyslexia and over-hype it has achieved things which even masterpieces fail to. This world is full of ironies. SM happens to be one of them. Sigh.

P.S: Be patient. You will also start disliking SM.