Today I reached office very late watching the Oscar award 08 ceremony with bated breath like any other Indians worldwide. It took almost a century for Indian Cinema to feel the Oscar pride , leaving aside the ones won by Satyajit Ray for his life time contribution and  for the film Gandhi . When A R Rahman won two Oscar awards and spoke both in Hindi as well as Tamil , I felt a great surge of joy . Am I becoming a Tamilian slowly ? The test will come when I start cheering for Chennai super King against Kolkata Knight riders at the  IPL. When Resul Pookutty  won the award for the best sound mixing , it was another  rags to riches story just like the slum dweller in slumdog millionaire. Hailing from a small village of Vilakkupara in Kerala’s Kollam district which didn’t  even have electricity, he studied under a kerosene lamp. With great struggle throughout his child hood he then went to the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune from where he graduated in 1995. Pookutty  who also won a BAFTA and a Cinema Audio Society (CAS) award for best sound mixing for the film,  has emerged as a champion of  small town aspirants who do not have many resources except talents and heartful of dreams . Jai Ho is just to sing praise for such individuals. Many have criticised this film calling it a slum - porn film or portraying Mumbai in a wrong way.  But at Dharavi slum, where lakhs of people live in a square kilometer area,
family of Rubina, who plays little Latika in the film, have found new hope through this  Oscar sensation. On the part of the Government and social organisations, we are now exposed to a brute reality. Can we do something to make the plights of slum dwellers little better ? Danny Boyle has once again opened our eyes.From the days of Satyajit Ray ,Mrinal Sen ,Hrishikesh Mukherjee and such film makers we were swept into the glitters of Bollywood  dominated by unimaginably expensive and moody casts, excessive dependence on expensive  sets and foreign shooting locations ,sky rocketing budgets . This  extreme commercialisation of Indian cinema compelled  technology and original thinking to take a back seat .A clear divide came between commercial cinema and what we call parallel cinema . The year  2008 of course saw many new trends of Bollywood , there were a series of releases centering around the life of common man or the film like Taare Zamin Paar.This type of experiment would  receive further boost from the works of Danny Boyle who has shown  the world how a very low budget film  can be shot in the real set of a slum in Mumbai and how a seamless integration of crew members  drawing from different cultures and ethnicity can be brought together to create a great art since art alone has the language that can transcend all geographical and cultural boundaries . The Dharavi slum has been there for ages but we needed a Danny Boyle to make a prize winning film on their lives. We have ideas, we have concepts, we have the lyricists , we have the composers ,we have technologies , we have the best of cast ,  and the Oscar award 2008 has proved all of these once again , but what  we lack is the ability to  integrate them, providing the right leadership and inspiration to the team and that is where we lack , we need a Danny Boyle to complete the job !

Jai Ho …