Slumdog Millionaire may have swept the Oscars, but it has bombed at the box office. So much so that, within days of its release, it was available on Direct-to-Home services for a paltry Rs 25. To make things worse, Salman Rushdie has panned the film. After saying good books rarely make good films, he says the book on which the movie was based was ‘a corny potboiler with a plot that defies belief’.
And the book, he says, ‘exceeds even the crassness of the book … to watch your hometown’s story being told in this comically absurd, tawdry fashion is, finally, to grow annoyed.’ As for director Danny Boyle’s statement that he knew little about India before he made the movie, Rushdie says, “Imagine an Indian director making a film about New York’s low life on the ground that he had never been to America before … he would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion ... Boyle, on the other hand, is praised to high skies … clearly the double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away”.