At this year’s Academy Awards, Slumdog Millionaire blew out the competition by winning eight Oscars for everything from Best Picture to Best Sound Mixing.
Slumdog seemingly has it all: action, romance, exotic locations, comedy, adventure, suspense, intrigue, and mystery. And with a chart-topping song and dance number thrown in for good measure. Yep, Indian composer A. R. Rahman got an Oscar for Jai Ho, a jubilent Bollywood number performed by the cast on an Indian railway platform.
Back off, Brad and Angelina! This year, there’s nothing hotter, nothing more relevant in than Slumdog Millionaire. The novel that inspired the film, Q & A, was penned in 2005 by diplomat Vikas Swarup, who is coming to the Ubud Writer’s Festival in October.
It’s great fun to read the book after enjoying the film. It’s an addictive page-turner - speedy enough to read on a visa run. Compared to the movie, the book presents an even greater onslaught of tenuous situations and twists and turns for the indefatigable young protagonist.
It’s a thrill ride from the first page, a trip to the dreaded police station. Under arrest is waiter Mohammed Ram Thomas (named at an orphanage unsure of his religion) for, of all things, winning India’s hottest TV game show. The layers of corruption in the first chapter don’t exactly reflect nicely on the world’s largest democracy, but Swarup is calling attention to class structure and human rights issues as well as the power of karma.
At the onset of this tale, the network executives producing the show are stunned. How does an uneducated chai wallah of eighteen years possibly know the obscure answers to all the questions posed? For each answer, Swarup unfolds a new chapter of young Mohammed’s life to let us learn how the boy gained his knowledge, one painful lesson at a time. That narrative structure is a big part of what makes the novel a success.
The book has been out for a few years but, understandably, the film’s release was met with some controversy in the subcontinent. Parts of Slumdog may not what every Indian thinks is a good national image to send to the moviegoing masses, but plenty of people from Bombay to Bengal are justly proud to see an Indian cast do so well abroad. More than portraying India as a hell-hole, the film has been well-received as the feel-good movie of the year.
Credit is due screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who streamlined Q & A into the script that catapulted Swarup’s story into its status as global phenomenon. And, yes, Beaufoy got the Oscar for his efforts.
But Ubud gets the man behind the sensation. In some ways it’s hard to believe that this was Swarup’s first major effort in fiction. While there are a couple of unpolished stylistic and narrative elements, it certainly hasn’t harmed the novel’s overall appeal. It’s one of those tremendously clever books by an unknown upstart that drives less decorated writers into paroxysms of jealousy.
Just as those snarling hacks might be scraping together reasons why the book didn’t deserve to succeed, the irony can’t be lost on Vikas and his fans. In Q&A, Vikas delves deeply into the realms of the privileged and the unlucky, and of luck and karma. Ram Mohammed Thomas is almost saintly in his suffering but endearingly human in his love and generosity. Vikas writes of how virtue conquers the unpleasant reality of a life-and-death pecking order based on corruption and enforced with brutality. The heroic tale of the downtrodden chai wallah tells the reader not merely how to get along with others, but what it is to live by the golden rule. Can the self-appointed grammar and style police get the message already?
If ever there was a great story of Suka Duka, (this year’s festival theme of caring for and helping others), it is Q&A. While the film gives audiences a protagonist who overcomes overwhelming odds in the pursuit of love, the novel treats the reader to rich episodes of selfless struggle and an ending of enormously satisfying compassion and karmic retribution.
