Slum Dog Millionaire Spreads Rabbies .....

Fiction is much more appealing than sordid facts...

According to the Indian Statistical Institute’s survey of the country’s 575 districts, urban poverty was bleakest in Mumbai, the city that was being advertised as the future Shanghai. The number of people living below the poverty line had risen — repeat, risen — by 20% in the last five years. Murshidabad, once capital of Nawab Siraj ud Daulah, described by an astonished Clive as richer than London when he saw it for the first time, is now the poorest district in the country, with 1.47% of people below the poverty line.

In a separate report, the United Nations World Food Programme says that the largest concentration of hunger in the world is in India: 230 million, or 27% of the world total. Fifty percent of child deaths are due to hunger. Nearly 43% of children under five are underweight, as compared to only 28% for sub-Saharan Africa. And, 70% of children under five are anaemic, a figure that has risen by six per cent in the last six years.

Television, that lightning rod of middle-class values, which screamed itself into a stupor over the Slum dog millionaire movie Winning Oscars, ignored these reports completely. They were not even awarded the courtesy of a crawler, the line of letters that trots by on news channels below the aggressive self-importance of the screen.

No anchor had a question as to how numbers below the poverty line have risen by 20% in the last five years when every minister of the Union of India has proclaimed that the era of dross has given way to the age of gold.

Indifference is the respectable fact of contempt. The rich don’t quite understand why there is so much fuss about calling a child a ‘slumdog’, possibly because they treat their dogs better than they treat slum children.

The English-speaking Mumbaikar finds it so much more pleasant to see Dharavi through Hollywood than stop at the great slum on the way to the airport.

Fiction is so much more palatable than fact...The hype had only one explanation : we love the idea of winning even if it is through surrogates.

Maybe Real life is a Bitch and the poor Slum Dog Paupers are facing the Heat !