Millionaire class

Slumdog scores as tale of poverty and hope | Mindy Belz

Warner Independent Pictures

Rudyard Kipling captured Bombay ("Mother of Cities to me") with its purple fruits, shadowy palm-groves, and "gaily dressed Parsees wading out to worship the sunset." Kipling would have been fascinated by today's Mumbai with its international call centers, high-rise apartment buildings, Bollywood trappings among slum-dwelling poverty, and recent terrorist attack. As he captured late 19th-century Bombay on paper, so directors Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan with Slumdog Millionaire memorably show on film the city's 21st-century dynamism.

The title suggests the story: An uneducated 18-year-old from the slums, a chai-wala (tea seller), becomes a record-breaking contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? When police arrest for potential fraud Jamal Malik, the contestant the whole country is watching, on the eve of his final round, he has a simple response to that question: "I know the answers."