Vikas Swarup, author: Slumdog Millionaire isn't poverty porn

Slumdog Millionaire isn't poverty porn, says author 18 Jan 2009, 0209 hrs IST, Meenakshi Kumar, TNN  Print   Email   Discuss  Share  Save  Comment Text: NEW DELHI: Diplomat Vikas Swarup, whose novel was used as the basic story of the film Slumdog Millionaire, has an answer to all those crying  Diplomat Vikas Swarup themselves hoarse about the "negative" portrayal of India: Slums are a reality in India.  Swarup, whose 2003 debut novel Q and A, featured slums mainly towards the end, tells STOI the Hollywood-funded, British-made film doesn't depict them as places of "unmitigable despair".  He says on the phone from Pretoria where he is posted as India's deputy high commissioner, "There is nothing negative about the slums as depicted in the film. Slum dwellers are not shown as people wallowing in sorrow. On the contrary, they are trying to make their life better, they have aspirations, dreams and desires. The fact that the slums are giving way to skyscrapers is a reality. In the end, the film is about hope and survival."  Ever the diplomat, Swarup is polite to a faultabout the film straying from the original plot of his novel. Q and A was primarily about luck but the film is about destiny. Swarup's book featured an illiterate boy winning the biggest prize on a quiz show because of miraculous good fortune, namely a full and active life having adventures in orphanages and brothels, with gangsters and Bollywood celebrities.  But Swarup is not worried that the film has changed all that. For him the biggest change is in the name of the protagonist, Ram Mohammad Thomas, who becomes Jamal Malik. "Obviously, unlike a book, a film doesn't have the leisure of space to explain all the details. Anyway, a film is a creative interpretation of a director. He can take liberties with the script," Swarup says this without a hint of disappointment in his voice. Instead, he jokes that if all films were true to the books they were based on, why ever would the books be read?   more

Vikas Swarup's novel becomes Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire

Oliver twisted in Mumbai express

Mon, Nov 3 02:15 AM

Dharavi may be the world's biggest slum, but the grit and determination of its inhabitants is what acclaimed British director Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, is about. Scripted by Simon Beaufoy (of The Full Monty fame), the film is an adaptation of Vikas Swarup's novel, Q and amp; A. As the story begins, the irrepressible hero Jamal (Dev Patel) is close to winning the top prize in the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? but the producers and police are convinced he must be cheating.

But the producers and the anchor Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor) are convinced Jamal is transpires cheating. "How can a slum dweller, a chaiwala in a call centre know the answers which even professors did not know?" they wonder.

Handed over to the police, Jamal is tortured to make him confess the truth. But it turns out that each question Jamal gets right is linked with his troubled past.

The schematic screenplay uses the questions as a way to uncover that past. It being a Danny Boyle film, the answers involve sprints through chocker back-streets, grisly flashbacks to the slum where a nine-year-old Jamal and his older brother, Salim, spend most of their childhood running from pimps and gangs.

The film has been nominated for six awards in the British Independent Film category of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. A remarkable feat considering Dev Patel and Freida Pinto are both first timers, while children brought up on the streets play Jamal and Salim.

Director Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame, said, "They are brilliant actors, you don't have to teach them about acting and #8230; It is part of everybody's DNA (in India)." Boyle has a carnivalesque approach, doesn't ignore the violence and squalor - the crushing poverty, children sifting through garbage, heartless, casual crime - yet celebrates the resilience of the orphans.

"I feel the temperature of the film is appropriate to my reaction to the place, which is that I loved it desperately. You kind of leave India at the end but it kind of doesn't leave you - it changes you.

" Anil Kapoor is impressed by the book: " It was a novel idea and I wanted to be part of it." And he has played that eminently.

Swarup is satisfied with the adaptation. "My own take is underclass.

The whole idea of the quiz show being an ubiquitous expose of life history through the film medium has been well-achieved," he said. What has wowed the London audience and critics is that there is no sermonising or running down of Swarup's underclass.

It weaves a dream for them, and is Boyle's tribute to "Mumbai, the maximum city".  source