Word: dev
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Slumdog Millionaire Everybody say namaste to director Danny Boyle's hurtling epic about a poor kid (Dev Patel) who improbably answers tough posers on the Indian edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? A masala of romance and history, with true grit plus a fabulous production number--it's what movies ought...
...young man, Jamal (Dev Patel), has miraculously, or suspiciously, spanned those two worlds. A tea server, or chai wallah, for a telephone marketing company, he has won a fortune on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The show's host (Anil Kapoor) is so skeptical of Jamal's ability to answer the questions that he has policemen try to torture the truth out of the lad. His explanations all relate to his hard life as a homeless orphan in the company of his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) and, not often enough, with the winsome, consistently abused...
...They begin with her unexpected pregnancy. Dev, whom Meera had first fallen for as she watched him compete in a school singing contest, is working as a clerk. But he's a tortured artist, and a baby, for him, would only derail his lingering fantasies of making it big in Bombay as a Bollywood playback singer. Meera's father, meanwhile, still hopes that she'll go to college and make something of herself beyond being a housewife, which for him symbolizes the feudal India of illiteracy and ignorance...
...coerced by Dev and Dad, who has promised to send the newlyweds to Bombay and buy a flat for them as a reward, Meera, already four months along, aborts. Suri's description of the procedure, in a scuzzy room above a bathroom-fixtures shop, is macabre and grating, but typical of his hyper-realistic prose, which animates the best parts of the novel with its frankness. "Scabs of green paint were peeling off the wall and ceiling," and a "strong meaty odor, like that from a fatty cut of mutton boiled in a curry, emanated from the door...
...layers to this sweeping though uneven and too long tale. The first is Meera's Austenian struggle as a caged woman seeking self-realization in a chauvinistic world. Hers is a moving story in theory, as she fights against the reign of her petty tyrant of a father, against Dev's alcoholism and neglect, and later, when Dev dies, against advances from her oily brother-in-law Arya. But she's also an irritating egoist and self-styled tragedienne who blames everyone else for her problems while selfishly, and in one case quite perversely, smothering teenage son Ashvin with...