The Moment of Truth

"Slumdog Millionaire(SM) does not show the real India". "SM is poverty porn".- These are some of the many things which caught my eye when I read the reviews of the
"toast of the world movie" - Slumdog Millionaire. So the one perennial question which orbitted my mind was - "What is the real India?"
So hush up and lean closer to your window screen my friends, for Iam about to tell you precisely albeit concisely, what India is all about.

Cliches are cliches as they are true. There is an old cliche about India - Anything you say about India, the opposite is also true.We like to think of ourselves as an ancient civilisation but we are also a young republic; our IT experts stride confidently into the 21st century but much of our population seems to live in each of the other 20 centuries. Quite often the opposites co-exist quite cheerfully. We have a cricket team which has the potential to win 15 matches in a row, but also the amazing vision of losing against Bangladesh. We have a railway minister who cannot pronounce "Harvard" correctly, but has given a lecture at that very place on how he turned the Indian Railway system into a money making machine.And I guess it is due to this attitude that India is what it is - A Proud Developing Nation.

Ours is a culture which elevated non-violence to an effective moral principle (read Gandhi), but whose freedom was born in blood and whose independence still soaks in it. We are the world’s leading manufacturers of generic medication for illnesses such as AIDS, but we have millions of our own citizens without access to AIDS medication, another two million with TB, and tens of millions with no health centre or clinic within 10 kilometres of their places of residence.

And yet, clichés are clichés because they are true, and the paradoxes of India say something painfully real about our society.

We are just not good enough. What we lack fundamentally, we try to make up by giving quotas, making expansive manifestoes, not casting votes, moving out of the country, and so on and so forth. So if a non Indian is reading this- Yes, India does have the slums show in Slumdog Millionaire, but if you have as much as half an ounce of self esteem, you would not step in them.