Slumdog Millionaire
By:
Crystal Siasang
crystalsiasang@gmail.com
This novel (by Vikas Swarup) is about an eighteen year old orphan named Ram Mohammad Thomas. He won a contest on the quiz show “Who Will Win a Billion?” After being the first person to answer all the questions correctly, he is accused of and arrested for cheating. Since this takes place in India, the police, who do not have civilized rules about dealing with people, torture and beat Ram to try to get the ‘truth’ out of him. The police wonder how an uneducated and poor orphan from Asia’s biggest slum could have known all the answers. Just before Ram is about to give in to the authorities so they will stop the torture, a lawyer named Smita Shah comes to Ram’s rescue.
Ram wonders who this lawyer is and why she’s helping him, but he decides not to question a miracle. Smita goes through the video footage of the show with Ram. The show hasn’t aired yet so not many people know about it. Ram claims that he knew the answers because they asked questions that he knew the answers to. Question by question, Ram takes us through the exciting journey of his life and how some of the events he went through indirectly answered the questions for him. Almost all the questions reminded him of some experiences he had gone through.
Just for the viewers, Prem Kumar, the show’s host, had to help him out on the second question during a commercial break. The show would be more exciting if they were dealing with more money. After that, Ram answers all the questions correctly until the last question. Prem tricks him by changing the original question after he finds out Ram knows the answer during a commercial break. When they come back, he asks a new question and it goes to commercial again.
During this break, we find out why Ram really came on the show, who his lawyer really is and why she wanted to help him. From the day Ram was born he was put on someone’s doorstep. He never really had a family, just many friends he made along the way. Ram went from living in a chawl (a mud house with a tin roof) with his best friend Salim and helping out a new neighbour to living with an old-time actress, a hit man and at a disabled children’s camp that was run by a cruel man who did anything but help the children. Ram tells us about his many encounters with the death of people he got to know, to barely escaping with his own life sometimes.
This book is a great example of poverty and how children grow up in third world countries. The author is from India and although he grew up having a good childhood, it’s hard to ignore all the unfortunate children around you. Slumdog Millionaire, previously published as Q and A, was his first novel. Besides publishing his second book called Six Suspects, he has written for TIME, The Guardian, The Telegraph (UK), Outlook magazine (India) and Liberation (France). Apart from reading, Vikas enjoys listening to music and playing cricket, tennis and table tennis.
The author usually writes about optimism and how the characters in his stories overcome challenges. The theme of this book is destiny. The protagonist in this story is overcome by so many challenges throughout his life but he is probably considered lucky compared to some of the other characters. Not many of children are as lucky as Ram to get on a quiz show and win a billion rupees. Ram thinks luck has got nothing to do with it though. Even though he had a lucky coin, it turns out the coin was ‘heads’ on both sides. He tossed the coin to make some of his decisions but really, he knew what to decide because he knew it would land on heads either way.
Besides the exciting twist at the end, Ram also went on the show to win over his lost love. He was seventeen when he first met Nita, a young prostitute. He quickly fell in love with her and wanted to marry her (even though most people would never marry a prostitute). The only problem was Nita’s pimp; Shyam will only allow Ram to marry her if he compensates him for the loss of his earnings which turns out to be an estimated 400,000 rupees. Ram wants to kill Shyam but Nita won’t allow it because he happens to be her brother.
So Ram, having no money and his promise not to kill Shyam, has to figure out a way to rescue Nita. He leaves her, promising to come back with the money. After a couple months of not hearing from her, Ram doesn’t know where Nita is or if he will ever see her again. But he is determined to find her and doesn’t give up until the end.
This is a really great book. It’s a love story with many twists and turns. It has also been turned into a movie. I found that the novel had more misfortune than the movie. Some of the flashbacks differed between the two. Also, the flashbacks Ram has in the book are kind of all over the place. It goes from age twelve to eight to when Ram is seventeen, where in the movie the questions are in order with his flashbacks. (He starts from childhood to his teenage years to being a young adult). I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to read about adventures and challenges or for people who would like an inside look on the unlucky children’s lives in the slums. But ‘luck has got nothing to do with it’. In the end, Ram throws away his lucky coin because he says “luck comes from within”.
[][][][]
[][][][]
«»«»«»«»«»«»
ادبی ـ هنری