Mumbai slums @ Joerg Wendt-Gaudreault, via NowPublic

If you enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire‘s rag to riches story but were left wondering what slum life was really like sans MIA soundtrack, I strongly suggest you go and read Katherine Boo‘s “Opening Night,” a feature article published in the February 23, 2009, edition of the New Yorker magazine. In a dazzling display of descriptive, cinematic writing, Boo catapults the reader right into Gautam Nagar, a shanty town nestled against Mumbai’s international airport. Gautam Nagar is home to Sunil, a thirteen-year-old metal thief who dreams of getting his ear pierced, thinking it might make him feel more like a man. Sunil sleeps with pigs at night, and roams with slum boys high on Indian Liquid Paper by day. This being non-fiction, however, “Opening Night” may best be described as a rags to rags story. It doesn’t end with a kiss; not even a Bollywood-style grazing of the upper-lip.

To my sense – and go read it for yourself to verify this isn’t just a delirious young writer enamoured with the power of words – Boo’s New Yorker article was way more vivid, fresh, and sensorial than Slumdog Millionaire, a two-hour moving picture. Her descriptions of the neighbourhood “baldies”, little girls who develop bald patches on top of their heads from being infected with a vicious but apparently banal type of stomach-worm, and of the batty older gentleman who’d painted zebra stripes on a forlorn donkey that wanders around chewing trash, will stay with me for quite some time. In J-school, writing workshop profs always incite us to “show, don’t tell.” I’m thinking that instead of telling us that, they probably should’ve just shown us this article. It seriously kills.

PS. I could have told you about these parallel slum narratives quite a lot sooner had I not been so put off by the whole Slumdog Millionaire mania. This time around, I’d staged such a lengthy boycott I was genuinely surprised to find a theatre still showing the darn thing. Quite frankly though, this teenage habit of avoiding anything I consider mainstream or popular has to be one of the dumbest things I do. For all I know, I’ll end up giving in, at 40, and discovering that my true nature lies in McDonald’s chicken nuggets, all things microwavable, Oprah, fast cars, U2, TV news and Danielle Steel novels. Just watch.