NEW DELHI India's most hotly awaited film is an Oscar frontrunner about the aspirations of some of the world's most disadvantaged people. Slumdog Millionaire is a modern-day fairytale about the quintessential Indian dream of getting ahead, getting out and getting rich.

To millions of slum dwellers in India, it's a familiar theme. The chances of emulating the movie's protagonist may be small, but many real-life slumdogs demonstrate a fierce optimism that they will achieve a better life, despite their dismal surroundings.

Like the setting of the film, Delhi's Wazirpur slum is lined by shacks packed so tightly they are accessible only by walking in single file past oozing sewers. In a tiny bare brick space, barely two metres by two-and-a-half, diminutive Priya Oriya eats, cooks, bathes, sleeps and watches television. She shares the room with another woman.

Priya, 17, has chosen to be a slumdog, and her life reads like a film script. After fleeing the rural hopelessness of West Bengal's tea gardens five years ago, she left her family when they fought with her over her boyfriend, a Muslim. Several abortions later, the couple are still together.

“I can do what I want here. I am too young to have children. I came here for a better life and I would not go back,” says Priya, who earns Rs2,500 a month as a domestic servant. “In the village there are no jobs. What would I do?”

Freedom of the slum

In the freedom of the slum, she can wear what she likes and buy what she wants a mobile phone, a CD player and a television. Although illiterate, Priya says she wants a “big house”.

“Why not? I will work for it.”

Like the movie portrayal, crime is never far away. Priya's younger brother became addicted to glue sniffing after joining a local gang.

“I used to roam the alleys at night looking for him. Once I got him out I sent him to live with my father. He's too young to be on his own here,” she says.

Although the landscape of Indian cities has become dotted with new apartment blocks and gated communities of whitewashed mansions, these sit as small islands in seas of slums.

More than half of the residents of India's two biggest cities, Mumbai and Delhi, live in slums. By 2025, the population of each is expected to be exceeded only by that of Tokyo.

The most striking feature of slum life is the smell. Sewage runs freely and the stench of faeces is ever present.

Yet most people are getting on with everyday life. There are temples, mosques and churches. Children play in the dirt. Stallholders sell everything from gas canisters to saucepans on the streets.

On the roof of her tenement block, 20-year-old Sunita Khatri Chhetri, who cleans factories for a living, laughs when she is told about this movie about slums and the young people who thrive inside them.

'We are people also'

“It is good. We are people also. If you are in the village you cannot improve yourself. In the city you are able to be in touch with people who are higher up in society,” she says in a mixture of Hindi and English. “I am looking to move up. Who is not?”

Indian critics say Slumdog Millionaire is likely to break social taboos in India a movie lauded around the world that will shine a spotlight on the widespread apathy about poverty.

Binoo K. John, deputy editor and columnist on Mail Today, said Slumdog Millionaire gave “hope to the poor in (a) way we have never seen before”.

“Books and films in India are generally about the elite's aspirations and their disappointments,” he said. “Bollywood is about family. It is about marriages. The poor, especially the urban poor, never get redemption in works of fiction in India. That is what makes Slumdog Millionaire such a fantastic film.”

There has been some debate about whether the film can claim to be authentically Indian. Slumdog Millionaire was directed by the British film-maker Danny Boyle, best known for the frenetically bleak Trainspotting. The film is based on a novel, Q&A, by the Indian writer and diplomat Vikas Swarup, and adapted by Simon Beaufoy, the British screenwriter best known for his Oscar-winner The Full Monty.

Although a third of the movie is in Hindi, Slumdog has little to do with conventional Indian cinema, where films are invariably framed by glamorous foreign locations, family feuding and overblown fight-cum-dance sequences. Bollywood recreates Indian city streets in a studio. Boyle filmed in the warren of Mumbai's biggest slum, setting up cameras in red-light areas.

Loveleen Tandan, who shares co-directing credits with Boyle, said Slumdog was “an outsider's view of India, but one that is sensitive to another culture. It's got a cutting-edge look mixed in with an Indian pot-boiler story about gangsters and a girl stuck in the middle.”

She said the British director wanted a Dickensian-style tale set in an Indian city. “Similar to the way Charles Dickens used Victorian London, Slumdog's got a dark side.”

Some experts likened Boyle's movie to last year's Booker prize winner, The White Tiger, which sparked a debate on domestic servitude. Miloon Kothari, the former UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, said Slumdog could do the same by capturing on film a sense of how people survive in horrendous conditions.

“There's a denial in the middle classes in India about the need for slums. Slums provide the labour in a city and are vibrant places. If the film can raise a debate about these things it should be welcomed.”—Dawn/Guardian News & Media