Truth stranger than fiction?

No less a person than Amitabh Bachhan was misguided enough to lend his considerable weight to this blinkered view, which he later sought to disown when he faced a barrage of criticism.

Equally bigoted is the pro-Hindu brigade, which is claiming that the film is "hurting religious sentiments".

As a people, Indians seem incapable of distinguishing between a work of fiction and fact, which is why artists - filmmakers, artists and writers - keep being targeted on the specious belief that their work is offensive.

"Slumdog" is a kind of crossover: a Hollywood (read Westernised) movie made with a Bollywood formula. It is, as film, a work of art, that deserves to be examined. The concluding dance at the city's main Gothic railway terminus is a genuflection to Bollywood. The plot itself is full of cliches: rages to riches, boy reunited with girl. It has a School for Scoundrels, with its very own Fagin, straight out of Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist". As in the novel, there are Artful Dodgers who make their living as petty criminals and earn a great deal of the audience's sympathy.

Some of the characters are also over the top - a devious Fagin and his henchmen, and in particular the sleazy gangster who lolls about his molls, while Freida Pinto plays the exploited kept girl.

In Mira Nair's "Salaam Bombay", made in 1988, the character Krishna and his fellow street children are paragons of virtue, untouched by the petty crime they are forced to indulge in to make a living on the mean streets of Mumbai (as the city was renamed in 1995). Just as the actor Dev Patel is reunited with his childhood sweetheart Pinto at the end of "Slumdog", Krishna liberates the prostitute Rekha, who is the common-law wife of the Fagin, a trafficker in drugs and prostitution in this movie made 20 years earlier.

If these two films set in the underbelly of Mumbai are guilty of contrived plots and characters, the film techniques are equally questionable. "Slumdog" proceeds at a dizzy, unrelenting pace. Does Mumbai really have such energy, or is this the stuff of which movies are made? Does the city only represent such blatant extremes - shanties and skyscrapers cheek by jowl?

No Indian photographer or filmmaker worth his salt will depict these contrasts because he will immediately be accused of being cliched. It is another matter altogether that recent Bollywood movies have erased the poor, out of sight and out of mind, creating a total fantasy about the way people live in this city.

The film is aided and abetted by equally dizzy camera work, the chase in the slums during a communal riot shot with a hand-held camera to convey the impression of cinema verite. The frenetic camera work is at variance with the predictability of the plot and has nothing much to do with it. It is meretricious - meant to dazzle, but not to illuminate.

There are aerial shots of festering slums, which lay down the context, but not the content, of the story. And, inevitably, touristy scenes - the epitome of voyeurism by foreigners - abound: the washermen's working colony in Mumbai and, in one inexplicably long train journey, nothing less than the Taj Mahal, with the undulating dunes of the Rajasthan desert thrown in for good measure.

All this might sound like carping, but one wonders if life isn't imitating art here? Unknown to most viewers, Celador, a British firm that co-produced "Slumdog", has also produced the TV series "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" on which the Star TV series Hindi equivalent "Kaun Banega Crorepati" was based. No wonder that "Slumdog" was able to use the actual sets of KBC, its signature tune, and so on. It is now seeking to cash in on the hype surrounding the film to launch a new reality series, titled "Secret Slumdog Millionaire".

"Super-rich" people (are any left in today's turbulent times?), travelling incognito, will traverse the metropolis's festering slum colonies, posing as visitors, and later donate large sums of money to deserving but unsuspecting families. In the original "Secret Millionaire" series, wealthy businessmen visit the seedy, derelict areas of England undercover and announce their largesse to needy people.

Most reality TV is highly exploitative of viewers' sensibilities, preying on their vicarious thrill at seeing a contestant humiliated - as B-grade Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty was in the controversial British TV series "Big Brother" - or, conversely, in the "Millionaire and Secret" series, at seeing lucky people selected at random for large handouts that will change their lives forever but leave their less-fortunate neighbours as badly off as they were before.

"Slumdog may well have swept eight Oscars but it is unlikely to make viewers aware of what is happening in and to Mumbai's slums.

(The author lives in India.)