Is Slumdog Millionaire anti-Indian?
This is one interesting controversy. The originator of it, Amitabh Bachchan has taken it a U-turn, and has already called Slumdog Millionaire a "wonderful film". But more and more people are joining what "The Independent" calls a smear campaign (http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20090131/908/ten-smear-campaign-hits-oscar-favourite.html). The latest one to join is Priyadarshan. He has called the film a "cheap trashy mediocre version of erstwhile Bollywood hits." (http://in.news.yahoo.com/43/20090201/914/ten-slumdog-millionaire-is-mediocre-tras.html) Well, in all fairness, we know that Priyan has made many "cheap trashy mediocre versions of erstwhile Hollywood hits," but let it stay there. There is one point in which I would tend to agree to him: "The angry director wonders why there isn't a single shot in 'Slumdog...' that shows the more aesthetic side of Mumbai?" So here we are. Just how anti-Indian is Slumdog Millionaire?

I just compiled a list of negative portrayals of India/Indians in the film. Some of them true, some exaggerated:
1. Police brutality, including a never-heard-before shock therapy.
2. The slums, especially the toilets. No comments.
3. A boy getting himself bathed in s**t to get an autograph of Bachchan.
4. The riots. (A boy dressed as Rama just stands there, amidst all hullaballoo! And I have no idea how Jamal understood that its Rama.)
5. The mafia which creates child beggers; the children made blind to enhance the impact.
6. The kid theieves in trains.
7. Fraud tour guides.
8. People steals the bulk of the spare parts of a car in which Jamal had brought his foreign tourists. The Indian driver brutally assaults Jamal for this, the angel foreigners intervenes and pays Jamal some American bucks as compensation!
9. The red street.
10. The underworld.
11. In the call centre, the agents replace themselves with a chai-wala, and he in turn gives wrong directions to the caller. In another scene, almost all the agents leave their desks to whatch KBC.
12. In broad daylight, gangsters chases and abducts a girl in the VT railway station!
13. A game show host who hates the guy in hot seat because err.. he is a chai wala? Also the host gives the wrong answer to him during a break pretending to be helping!

On the positive side, there are:
1. High rise buildings (in the middle of a sea of huts)
2. The Taj Mahal
3. The call centres
4. You can see that I am clearly short of points here.

So we are back to the original question. Just how anti-Indian is Slumdog Millionaire?