Slumdog Millionaire [antikvár]

V BY SIMOH BEAUfOY I first visited India over twenty years ago. I was eighteen, alone and rather frightened by this vast land. But among the strangeness lay a comforting familiarity. Connaught Place could be Bath on a very sunny day, Victoria Terminus a grander and noisier St. Pancras; everywhere people spoke to me in English, knew about London, Lords, Manchester United. Echoes of Britain's rule were distant but ever present. Then I read Vikas Swarup's extraordinary book Q & A. Nothing that I thought I knew about India lay in these pages. Intrigued, I went to Mumbai. No trace of the Raj remained, not even the name Bombay. In its place was a city of gangsters, call centers, mobile phones dangling firom every wrist, a Bollywood film crew round every corner, and skyscrapers mushrooming on all sides. Here was a modern city that owed nothing to the past and was charging into the fliture at breakneck speed. The energy of the place, the sense of fifteen million people furiously on the make, was palpable from the rag pickers on the rubbish dumps to the fdm stars behind their high walls. Which is why Vikas's idea of an uneducated slum dweller turning up on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is so utterly beguiling. As I stepped into a country where the monsoon rain is a weapon, the sun is blistering, and the tea sweet enough to strip the enamel firom your teeth, the characteristics of the English writer—nuance, subtext, subtlety—all seemed suddenly inappropriate. For the first time in my career, I found myself experimenting with the grand, the operatic, the unashamedly melodramatic. The mystery that was Bollywood's singing and dancing finally made utter sense to me. In this magnificent country of extremes, why would you not sing, why would you not dance?