By Fiona Ehlers in Mumbai
Then his new life began. The show was recorded, not live, and the broadcast was not scheduled until a few days later. Friends called. Did you win? they asked. No, Nawathe said, lying. He had signed a contract with the station, Star TV, and was not allowed to say anything yet about winning. Nevertheless, the press learned of his victory and besieged his apartment. The station checked him into a hotel under an assumed name. At the hotel, surrounded by shopping bags full of new clothes, he walked the hallways and felt trapped by his good fortune.
Chaos erupted in Bombay on the evening of the broadcast. Large crowds convened on Film City, forming convoys of cars, honking their horns and blaring Hindi pop songs from their stereos. Thirty-three percent of viewers had watched the show, the highest audience rating in years.
Throughout the next year, Nawathe felt as if he were living in a film, but it was the wrong one. He received baskets of letters every day in which fans asked for autographs, donations for their temples, to meet him or to marry him. Everyone shook his hand, clinging to him, hoping that some of his luck would rub off. Although his father had already been retired for 7 years, there were spurious rumors he bribed the host, Bachchan, who had been embroiled in a tax scandal at the time. As a corruption expert, they argued, Nawathe's father must have known how to commit it.
Nawathe's life was suddenly filled with PR consultants, who convinced him to make 800 appearances, cut countless ribbons at dedication ceremonies, stand around at film parties and political events, open jeans boutiques, pastry shops and do commercials for cookies. To this day, there are still eight shopping malls in Bombay that are named after him.
He was used and turned into a brand name, a living example of the adage: "Everyone can make it, even you!" He didn't have to go along with everything, but he was too polite, and perhaps he was also seducible and dazzled by the glitz.
Sometimes his parents asked: What do you want to do with your life? He started going out a lot, with cricket players and Bollywood stars. But they were the celebrities and he was merely a quiet overachiever -- they were fleeting friends. And at the end of the day he would return to his parents' apartment, pull out the sofa bed and sleep next to his books.
At some point, Nawathe must have realized that he had lost. He owned a car, a watch and investments, but he lacked a plan. He had become lazy, living for the moment. He was depressed, the papers wrote.
He moved to Edinburgh to get an MBA, and gradually his life improved. There, he was no longer a celebrity and no longer hounded by the press, which was barred from the university campus. He completed his degree with honors. When Indian superstar Shahrukh Kahn was hired to host the next season of KBC, journalists called Nawathe to ask how he liked the new show. "My life goes on," he said. "I haven't watched a single episode."
He wanted to return home, because he knew that media fame and the ensuing failure are a global phenomenon, something that happens everywhere. But in Bombay, a film city in love with its movie stars, it was a different story. In Bombay, a person is either consumed or reinvents himself. If he could start again anywhere, it would be in Bombay, a city made for new beginnings.
He changed his mobile number, terminated all contracts, moved into a small apartment, threw out old photos and newspaper articles, and married. It was an arranged marriage. It wasn't as if he couldn't have had his pick of offers. But Nawathe asked his mother to find a woman who knew her way around the glamorous world of Bollywood and was not overly impressed by it. Before giving birth to their child, Nawathe's wife Sarika was an actress in daytime soaps. She says: "He is very sensitive." He says: "Life is better with her." It took him a long time to find fulfilling work. Most of the jobs he was offered involved promoting something.
For the past two years, Nawathe has been the deputy general manager of child rights at the Naandi Foundation, an Indian NGO. His story could be the material of an even better film: India's real "Slumdog Millionaire," the man who knows every answer, is helping Bombay's forgotten children to cope with life more effectively. Nawathe says: "It's time for me to give back some of my success." Hardly anyone in India knows this part of his story.
The problem is that no one is interested. Poverty is taboo in India, and it is considered shameful. This is why "Slumdog Millionaire" is so controversial here. For years, the Indian tourism industry has used the advertising slogan "Incredible India." The message it seeks to convey is that India is incredibly beautiful, not incredibly problematic. And then along comes this film, by a British director, about a Bombay urchin whose mother is murdered by fanatical Hindus, a boy who begs and steals and whose brother becomes a henchman of human traffickers. For Indians, it is a film made up of clichés -- and an insult.
"Slumdog" is especially offensive to the national pride of India's rising middle class. The movie theaters where the film is being shown are empty, and many film posters have been torn down. Big Bachchan, the former KBC host, doesn't think much of the film, and a well-known Indian director, writing in the magazine India Today, complains: "India is not Somalia. We are one of the foremost nuclear powers in the world. Our police commissioner's offices don't look like shacks and there are no blind children begging in the streets of Mumbai. This is an absolute and intentional exploitation of India."
Aravind Adiga calls what is now happening in India the "Slumdog effect." He has felt the same effect. The story of his debut novel "The White Tiger" is similar to that of the film, except that it is told in a much more malicious and provocative way. In the novel, an illiterate man works his way up the ladder to first become a driver, then a murderer and finally the head of an outsourcing firm. It is about an up-and-comer in the new India, about the mendacious world of the rich and the dark sides of the boom.
Adiga, 34, is sitting in a bar in Bandra West, on the chic side of the tracks, but not far from the huts where the child stars of "Slumdog" live. He speaks a refined American English, he wears a suit and leather loafers, and orders whisky on the rocks. Sales of his book in India, where it was ripped by critics, have been miserable. But it is a bestseller abroad and has been translated into more than 30 languages. "I wrote it for Indians," says Adiga, "and they hate it." Not even the fact that he was awarded the Booker Prize in London has changed their assessment. In India, he remains a denigrator of his country, a traitor. "It's a nightmare," he says, "I insulted my country and I am supposed to feel guilty. Unfortunately, it's true. I do feel guilty. India's true dictatorship is the middle class. I myself am from the middle class."
And now the country is offended again, this time by the film. Although Harsh Nawathe, India's real "Slumdog Millionaire," finds the film unrealistic, he also understands why it has upset people. When he was in England, he was once asked whether they still ride around on elephants in India. He says that he will never forgive the English for that question.
Perhaps Nawathe's story inspired the author of the book "Q &A," on which the film is based. Nawathe doesn't know. The author, an Indian diplomat, never contacted him, nor did Danny Boyle, the director of "Slumdog." Nawathe lives a very quiet life today, focusing on his family and his job. When he drives out to Kandivali, a poor neighborhood, there are no longer any cameras.
He is sitting on the floor of a classroom, on a shabby red carpet. Today is a test day. The pupils' knowledge of mathematics and Hindi will be tested. The children are given white pieces of paper with a large number of multiple-choice questions. Sometimes they pluck Nawathe's sleeve and ask him for the correct answer. The teachers record each child's test results in tables. They say that the children are making progress. Nawathe's organization offers remedial teaching for pupils who are behind in their studies, a service that is urgently needed in Bombay's government-run schools, where 40 to 50 students in a typical class rattle off a mantra of information they have memorized while their teacher talks on his mobile phone or reads the newspaper.
The children are from Poisar, a slum. They haven't seen "Slumdog." And why should they? They are all too familiar with the images it depicts. But they admire Nawathe. Their parents have told them about his quiz show victory years ago. The parents trust Nawathe. They no longer send their children out to beg or to collect garbage, but to attend his classes. They say, if anyone can teach our children, then he is the one. Sometimes Nawathe visits the parents in their huts and tells them: "If I gave your child a million rupees today, you would buy jewelry and cars, and then you would sell everything again. The only currency that remains is education. It's the only one that pays."
He plans to fly to New Delhi on the next day, but not to appear on a talk show or at some other public event. This meeting is about the future. He will negotiate with donors to raise the funds needed to accept 8,000 additional children into his remedial program. It will be a good day -- for Nawathe, for Bombay and for India.
Editor's Note: "Slumdog Millionaire" opens in Germany cinemas on Thursday.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.
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