Imagine if you have grown up somewhere in the UK instead of say India or Singapore. The movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai or let's say Jeans may not have meant as much to you as the BBC comeday Goodness Gracious Me. You may have learnt about Asha Bhosle only from the hit song by the band Cornershop. Maybe you do not care about Bollywood movies at all and would rather name people like M. Night Shyamalan or Ismail Merchant as your heroes. You may not have seen the movie Salaam Bombay by Mira Nair, much less heard about Pather Panchali by Satyaljit Ray. Maybe then, it is understandable if you proclaim the movie Slumdog Millionaire, played mainly by British Indian actors who speak impeccable English, as a wonderful film portraying poverty in India?

Jai Ho... and so it is indeed for A.R. Rahman at the Oscars, where he won Best Song and Best Original Score with the movie which has become a phenomenon in itself. It certainly must feel like a great moment for many as he incorporated some words in Tamil for his acceptance speech, in front of a predominantly white audience - "Ella Pugazhum Iraivannukey". (Poltically correct as he was, he had also included some words in Hindi - Mere Pas Ma Hai, and as we all know, it is always a good idea to mention the mother at an award show, that's something universal.) I personally feel very happy for him, for he has come a long way indeed, from doing music for Tamil movies and Hindi movies, even a Chinese movie once, and now this, becoming the first Indian musician to win an Oscar. But the way his personal triumph is celebrated in India leaves me somewhat bemused and amused. In fact I was rather embarassed when A.R. Rahman left the stage saying 'God bless' and those sexy Indian dancers were standing there posing in their pink costumes, shaking their hips for the audience.

Let's be clear about this - you can bet many would concur when anyway says this - the heyday of A.R. Rahman was when he exploded into the scene in the 1990s as a musical genius, doing music for movies like Roja, Bombay, Indian, Jeans, Dil Se (or Uyire in the Tamil version), Taal (featuring Anil Kapoor in another unlikeable role long before Slumdog), Sangamam and Alaipayuthey. Since then he has become established as a household name and remained a consistent and reliable music director, still deserving as an inspiration to a younger generation with musical aspirations, but... Well, let's just say this, a song like Jai Ho is so slight in its melody that it is simply something fittingly used for end credits, in fact it is a reject from the movie Yuvraaj. It is named a 'best song' now only because suddenly there is an idiot-proof movie about India that even an American audience can understand, and for them it's like, hey, I've never listened to any Indian song before but this one has a nice groove, let's be generous to these dark Asian people for once and give them an award! That's all to it. Imagine if your family has been running an Indian restaurant for generations, and one day you do catering for some western tourists and you give them some vegetarian burgers, Manchurian noodles and Kulfi; just because these white men come praising you for what you have served them, should you suddenly become proud of being Indian? Anybody who feels that way would just make my stomach turn. Well, ok, like A.R. Rahman said, he chose love instead of hate, and there he was on stage at the Oscars. Fine, a song like Jai Ho may turn out to be a good entry point for non-Indian audience who would not care for Indian popular or classical music otherwise. But to me it's like, thank God there is so much more in Indian music than this.

The winning formula of Slumdog Millionaire is really quite simple. It is much like an English guided tour in the incredible land of India - give the tourists some familiar or stereotypical images that capture their imagination, like the Taj Mahal, the slums in Mumbai, the dhoby and so on, but try to tell the story in English so that they will feel a bit more at home; when it comes to the characters as small children, no problem, you can have Hindi, they are so cute and lovable anyway, they can even shake their heads like how Indians normally do, the white folks won't understand the expression but they will find it cute too. And don't forget the dirtiest toilets in Mumbai, you can never go wrong with a scene like that, the audience is just dying to see how terrible and filthy life can be in India. (Anyway director Danny Boyle is so adept with it since he has already filmed the dirtiest toilet in Scotland in his early career.) Of course the film also benefits from a story based on the novel Q & A by Indian author Vikas Swarup, about a young chaiwalla who makes it big-time by becoming the greatest winner ever of a TV quiz show - this premise of the movie is just genius as a way to introduce a western audience to the history and culture of India. No quiz show in real life would ask such a simple question like what the figure of Lord Rama holds in his right hand. But it would be something new and fascinating to non-Indians, not to mention of course that it is a narrative device leading to a scene of inter-ethnic riots in Mumbai. No point for guessing that they would also include a question on cricket. This narrative structure of the story tied to quiz questions on India is a great way of enticing the audience to discover India as a cultural tourist, it gives one instant gratification because just by watching the movie, you experience the sensation of decoding this exotic land bit by bit, without actually having to read any history book on India, which will just give you a headache (is it any wonder most tourists prefer to read the Kama Sutra?). Now, in case it still doesn't sound convincing enough as a winning movie? You top it off with a sensational title which incorporates words like slum, dog and millionaire, and there you have it!

If it's sounding like I'm slamming the movie here, well, a thousand apologies. I've actually enjoyed it much more than one particular British movie about South Asians, namely Brick Lane. And I'm not even discussing whether the original novel has misrepresented the Bengali community there in real life, all that has been done. I would just say that if the movie is anything to go by, the novel by Monica Ali is probably more hype than anything. It is basically about a woman who has married in her teens to a man twice her age and moved to the East End in London to live as an obedient housewife until she learnt a bit more independence by doing a sewing job from home, and soon she finds her woman's liberation by having affair with a delivery man. That is so lame and predictable and it just fails to win my sympathy because I think there are more interesting immigrant stories even in Singapore, like how Bangladeshi workers are exploited and repatriated for no fault of theirs, or how south Indian workers are paid by a warped practice in which they have to return half the official salary to the employer every month. The artistic design of Brick Lane seems simply to be banking on the social aftermath of September 11 as a fashionable topic and to make the characters complex and contradictory. Hence you have this housewife falling for the young man but disapproving of his terrorist tendencies and refusing to go further with him, and you also have a husband who quotes British philosophers and disapproves of Islamic fundamentalism but eventually decides to return to Bangladesh thinking that things will not be the same again for his community in Britain after September 11. Is the intention simply to confuse and frustrate the reader or audience so that one may call it a sophisticated piece of work?

Slumdog Millionaire, on the hand, is thankfully a story that does not take itself so seriously. As we are watching it, we can all laugh about how Amitabh Bacchan is worshipped by his crazy fans in India, for instance. (By the way, I've seen the man in person too, it's no big deal.) Of couse, just by watching the movie, you would be none the wiser as to what the problem is in this massive country. You would just think people there are crazy and enjoy killing one another. Actually, I thought it would make an interesting scene if only some question like this is asked as part of the game show in the movie: say, what was the name of the British cartographer who drew the border between India and Pakistan within a matter of weeks? But I guess the British audience would not appreciate the joke too much. Then again, I must say there was one question in the movie that was rather interesting - it was about the Adam's Bridge between India and Sri Lanka, a shrewd and subtle political reference. Unfortunately it is so subtly tucked into the film that one could easily have missed it. It somehow echoes the state of awareness in the world for the Tamil region in Sri Lanka - largely muted. Incidentally, the British singer M.I.A. of Ceylonese Tamil origin, whose music is also featured in Slumdog Millionaire, who has been nominated for Oscar as well as Grammy, has also appeared on PBS talking about the issue of genocide in Sri Lanka, a comment which later saw a response of criticism from the Sri Lanka foreign minister. (Her father by the way was a founding member of a student organisation in support of Tamil Eelam.) But the Oscars did not turn out to be a similar platform for her views. Anyway, it seems not long ago that Tamil Eelam supporters were full of hope that they could go the way of Kosovo, but by now hope just seems ever dimmer and the comparison just seems ludicrous, for western interest is simply not there.

Politics aside, I have also enjoyed listening to the music of M.I.A. and I would always insist that culture in the periphery of a diaspora can be equally valid, though in this case I must say A.R. Rahman is more like the kind of music I can listen to on a regular basis. Her music is basically hip-hop-based with some Asian and African flavours here and there, and the kind that will appeal more to a British rather than American audience. Oh, if we are still on the topic of Sri Lanka and Tamil Tigers, there is a novel that may be worth reading, entitled Love Marriage, written by V.V. Ganeshananthan. And if you really think you have a soft spot for poor kids in India, there is a 2004 documentary film Born Into Brothels about children of prostitutes in Calcutta, it is now out on DVD. But of course as we all know, as well illustrated by the Slumdog phenomenon now, fiction will always have more appeal than reality.