Customer Reviews

Q & A

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The book is about a man who was brought to the police station and tortured because he had won 1 billion rupees (Indian currency) in a local Tv Show. He then told the story of his life that is related to each of the 12 questions asked in the show, to proove that for all of the questions asked, he knew the answers; even though there are many things in the world that he doesn't know of (like Bush is the US president).

The book is really funny and sad at the same time. It opens eyes about the reality of quality of living of poor people in India. A MUST READ. Worth my time :) I can't tell you anymore as you might not enjoy it as much as I did!

I read the book after I saw the movie, and I couldn't believe how different the two are from each other. I loved the movie but I also absolutly loved the book. It was well written and flowed very well.

This was a really good book. Once I started it I couldn't put it down, read it in 2 days. A few days later I rented the DVD. Boy, what a disappointment! I recommend you read the book and skip the movie.

Slumdog Millionaire... after hearing all the hype about the movie, I decided to take a look. Then I discovered it was a book first so I ordered it from Amazon and just had to read it first... before watching the movie. I read it in maybe 3 days and just LOVED it! Then I watched the movie and it was so far from the novel that I couldn't beleive it... the movie wasn't that great but I guess I was comparing it to the book which was awesome! Now the book is making the rounds with my family and friends and they all love it too....
IMHO... read the book and skip the movie!

Me thinks this tired theme has so been done to death it's almost cliché.

This implausable Romeo and Juliet plot, disguised as a
deconstructionist tale of power imbalance perfectly
depicts our Western misunderstanding of other cultures. Not only that
but our fascinating with such "fluff", demonstrates more about our own moral impasse and spiritual malaise, than it does about the so-called genius of a cock-eyed author.(and later film director)

You see, the book is all about the older brother. Not the younger. That is most peoples first mistake on their understanding of this.
Even as boys, always the contrarian, the older brother finds himself
not only at odds not only with his brother, (and lea) but the Brahmin value structure and his society, and even himself. His steadfast refusal
to treat his brother nicely, and conform to the social order of the slum, by
is a not-to-thinly-veiled representation of his increasing love for Western
decadence. These early indicators made me yawn, and begin flipping pages knowing that this mean-spiritedness served mainly as a buttress to his nagging existential angst.

This little boy who is a mute bundle of suppressed rage,
is in another analogy of reincarnation of which the director
peppers throughout his story and most of his other works. Again recurring = predictable.
Anyhow, this thumbing his nose at brotherly values initially devastates his brother, but he eventually comes to realize that his nonconformity(shown later to grow even stronger as he becomes a hardened criminal) is of the same spiritual fabric as his social iconoclasm.
At first he embraces a rabid, radical form of socio-religious fascism. However this is short lived.

It is therefore not without accident that, that they wind up at that crazy orphanage. They must part company with their life long cohorts whose rejection of theaccepted ways are but an extension of how he sees women and the horrors he witnessed as a child. He wants none of it! Yet he resents himself and projects his anger on the world at large in an attempt to distance himself from the truth he cannot bring himself to face.

Of course the director is intentionally ambiguous as to whether or not Jamal chooses to follow his brother, or whether fate(destiny) ultimately decides when they reunite later on. But the reader can decide! And I think you know as well as I do... While the younger brother is off being the free agent, he tries desperately not to cling to the then puppy love dream, of a bygone era with a girl he met in the rain. (again rain-get it??)

With no regime and community the older brother has now lost whatever moral
fibers he possessed , and enters the criminal world of whores and greed and slobs. This I believe is the authors portrayal, by extension of our modern suburbia and it's secular ills.(eg Pickering or Mississauga)

Totally unprepared for the unbridled misery of daily life and
embroiled in fear and chaos he seeks refuge under the bosom of the seductive woman(after the girl got older).The author introduces this relationship to underline the reversal of their parent/child roles and make his dream-laden brothers tears all the more stark as the last remnant of his soul dies with his orgasms, quietly
in their flat, but amongst the madness of the crowded city. This not surprisingly
infuriates the younger brother!!

Jamal then runs away and applies is skills learned in the slum(a metaphor for insecurity and uncertainty) to make money and becomes rich by casting himself on a game show (brief sub plot) and winning.

Filled with hate and loathing for a world around without meaning and beyond his control, he knows that this money will lead him to becomes bored and sloth-like.
It has to. Just look at the West.

Leaving the show suddenly, (possibly due to washroom improprieties with the host...?) , and motivated by enormous post traumatic gambling stress build up, that until now had been a secret(by the way) he feels shattered. As crowds scream and he becomes and instant celebrity, internally he projects
himself shuffling around the countryside penniless. He knows the transitory qualities of money. Rudderless and like broken marionette, in his vision he walks about in a grey-faced fog, searching for meaning in his empty life despite all this wealth. Wait a second he thinks...the girl...perhaps the girl will fill is aching void and save his soul!

Now back to the older brother! In a particularly poignant bathtub scene, he lays, stunned, staring into the wreckage of his life as he points a gun at the door. Again rolling my eyes at this predictable scene, it of course acts as a mirror for his life-as we later learn for everything. Before his revelation to rebel against the greedy gagsters the bathroom and flowers let us inside his mind as the older brother muses sadly: "I guess I knew it all along. The rot was always there, the creeping decay, painted and tiled over so that you never saw it until the whole structure collapsed...in a way." Not his words of course but God (Atman)
has obviously forsaken man to a cold and lonely eternity when one chooses greed. . And what a horrifying and terrible vision it
truly is... (hence the bathroom)

In several painful pages that lay bare a complex scene of
macabre and bitter truth, the gangsters take him in a firestorm but not before
he kills the main bad guy.

But wait!!!!
Possibly in Hindu belief, if one surrounds themselves with flowers they offer eternal protection.
The flowers(light receiving cells) transform...and begin giving life. It's the flowers who shall free him from his destiny as a captive and slave in a prison of his own making. In this sense,the bathtub with flowers is a living paradox in action encompassing the polarity of
all things.

Back to Jamal. After his re-awakening, he becomes obsessed with the girl.
But what about her? How does she feel. In a crying scene, it is evident she is torn between motherhood from a dead gangster on the one hand
and bonding to a strange(now rich) young man she barely knows,
She chooses neither. Rather she longs to engage in the realm of ideas and the larger social religious order.

She must decide for herself what her fate will be... a world of money? A world she saw and experienced as inhabited only by fear, shame, terror and the vacant-eyed armies of fashionable shallow yuppies. They only serve as window dressing covering up their own Kierkigaardian uncertainties.

She in fact chooses that as she looks into the lustful Jamals eyes and simply figures what the hell. Here is my ticket Thus Bollywood is setting itself up for a part 2- again more reincarnation theme.

j'ai lu Q&A et je l'ai beaucoup aimé. C'est pas la meilleure lecture que j'ai jamais faite mais elle est bonne pareille.

Je dois dire que par rapport au film, je crois que le film est meilleur, mais ce n'est pas parce que le livre est pourri, au contraire il est très bon mais il y a plus de twists dans le film et c'est pour cela que je l'aime plus.

This book was just amazing...it was nothing like the movie at all...if you watched teh movie and think you don't need to read the book...think again because not one thing was the same...the questions asked, his family life, even his name was changed in the movie, which made a big difference on his life...every story told was beautiful.

I found this book heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and very educational...one of my all time favorites!

the book is different from the movie, book is way better.
i love how the author links the characters to one another in the story.

when you start reading it, there's no way to put it down.

Great book. This book makes you learn, question your thinking, laugh and cry all at the same time.

An excellent written book with a story which gives an insight into an aspect of a country which is heard of however little known about. Great reading.