Poverty Porn: The New Buzzword!

I've just gotten the drift of what this conversation was all about. At first I thought it was a repetition of our usual cacophony of voices all trying to say somthing relevant about a popular topic. I'm talking about Slumdog Millionaire and next week's much-anticipated Oscars.

So I saw the movie. It was ok. Interesting storyline, and I especially liked the cuts between the interrogation and past... and I thought the boy playing the little Jamal was adorable.

But why all the fuss? Why was the issue of a "foreigner" coming to "our country" and showing its "dark underbelly" such a big deal? Frankly, I didn't really give it much thought.

Then I read Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger" this same week.

Oh. Dear. GOD.

Let me give you an extract printed with the publisher’s permission:

“Next, the lady announcer said, 'Mr Jiabao wants to meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips.'

She explained a little. Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepre­neurs - we entrepreneurs - have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”

This is what The New York Sun says says: "Unpretentious and compulsively readable...Aravind Adiga's auspicious debut novel is at once a fascinating glimpse beneath the surface of an Indian economic "miracle," a heart-stopping psychological tale of a premeditated murder and its aftermath, and a meticulously conceived allegory of the creative destruction that's driving globalization."

Now here's an extract I've pulled out WITHOUT permission:

"Here I had to stop, because five feet ahead of me a row of men squatted on the ground in a nearly perfect straight line. They were defecating.

I was at the slum.

Vitiligo-Lips had told me about this place - all these construction workers who were building the malls and giant apartment buildings lived here. They were from a village in the Darkness; they did not like outsiders coming in, except for those who had business after dark. The men were defecating in the open like a defensive wall in front of the slum: making a line that no respectable human should cross. The wind wafted the stench of fresh shit towards me.

I found a gap in the line of the defecators. The squatted there like stone statues.

These people were building homes for the rich, but they lived in tents covered with blue tarpaulin sheets, and partitioned into lanes by lines of sewage. It was even worse than Laxmangarh. I picked my way around broken glass, wire and shattered tube lights. The stench of faeces were replaced by the stronger stench of industrial sewage. The slum ended in an open sewer - a small river of black water went sluggishly past me, bubbles sparkling in it and little circles spreading on its surface. Two children were splashing about in the black water."

Here’s another review by Neel Mukherjee of The Sunday Telegraph, just for contrast: "Blazingly savage and brilliant... an excoriating piece of work, relentless in its stripping away of the veneer of 'India Rising' to expose its rotting heart... Adiga is going to go places. We'd do well to follow him.”

Right into the sparkling sewage water, I imagine.

My take? I hated the book, but at least I’ve now understood the meaning of “Poverty Porn”. However the real eye opener for me is why Danny Boyle is getting all the criticism while Arvind Adiga just got the prize and adulation. Simple. No one reads. Not even the critics.