It isn’t about cows or cobras, a wedding or outsourcing. It isn’t about gurus or Gandhi. “Slumdog Millionaire,” in fact, may be the first world-traveling film about India in a generation to discard the old, smudged lenses for seeing this country.
Its novelty has given it a dream run in U.S. movie theaters, and last week it won best dramatic picture at the Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles. It now is given a good shot at the Academy Awards next month, even though much of the dialogue is in Hindi.
But the film’s freshness lies not just in how the West sees India. It lies, too, in how Indians see themselves. It portrays a changing India, with great realism, as something India long resisted being: a land of self-makers, where a scruffy son of the slums can hoist himself up, flout his origins, break with fate.
Read it all.
Indians adopt a vision under siege in America
It isn’t about cows or cobras, a wedding or outsourcing. It isn’t about gurus or Gandhi. “Slumdog Millionaire,” in fact, may be the first world-traveling film about India in a generation to discard the old, smudged lenses for seeing this country.
Its novelty has given it a dream run in U.S. movie theaters, and last week it won best dramatic picture at the Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles. It now is given a good shot at the Academy Awards next month, even though much of the dialogue is in Hindi.
But the film’s freshness lies not just in how the West sees India. It lies, too, in how Indians see themselves. It portrays a changing India, with great realism, as something India long resisted being: a land of self-makers, where a scruffy son of the slums can hoist himself up, flout his origins, break with fate.
Read it all.