Saw slumdog millionaire last night and loved it .
Now I can't understand those who say this shows India's grotesque underbelly when we have lot of great things to show - including a state of the art suspension bridge over the bandra-worli sea space and probably the plans for the worlds tallest building . They couldn't be more wrong.
Only suffering , strife , struggle makes for a great plot . Every single piece of literary fiction whether it camouflaged as humor , paraded as parody or depicted as a tragedy has 'suffering' at its core . There can be no story worthwhile without suffering . Go back to Shakespeare , Milton , Updike , Heller , Dickens , Eliot , Kafka or even Wodehouse , who makes it light and bearable - 'suffering' is the essence of a story . For the magic of any story is the change in its key character between the beginning and end of the plot - an emotional growth , a fulfilment , a redemption . How can a story achieve that if the protagonist starts and ends without any change in his character and personality - status quo is no story! The characters that stay etched in your mind are the ones that had the greatest change in their state of being - Nazneen in Brick Lane , David Copperfield , Nicholas Nickleby , Howard Roack in Fountainhead ,Yossarian in Catch 22, D'Artegnan in Three musketeers , Ali in Kite runner , or Jemal in Slumdog .
Think of the another example closer to real life - Dhirubhai Ambanis' is a great story , Lakshmi mittal , Amitabh , Kishore Biyani , Sunil Mittal , Azim Premji ,Rahul Bajaj , Barack Obama , Nelson Mandela , Gandhi are all great stories - each one of them is of immense fortitude , searing ambition, enormous sacrifices and remakable achievement against all odds . Anil Ambani , Aditya Mittal , Abhishek , Sanjeev Bajaj or Rahul Gandhi can never be the stuff of legends since they start with billions and build empires further - its not a growth of character , just an delta extention of the inheritance thats been handed out to them .
Where is the 'pain' , its endurance and the emotional growth that makes it compelling for the world to participate ?
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