Slumdog unbelievably believable No, really believable: It could actually happen. Not the money (a slumdog may have every chance of making a fortune), but the manner. It might actually happen through the remnant dignity of Dev Patel’s Jamal, an utterly improbable, but not impossible, slumdog. Perhaps outsider director Danny Boyle has reported on the Indian slum more precisely than any insider Indian ever would have: its squalor, the randomness of its violence, the disgusted-ness of the state’s too often chasing down of the poor while sahibing to the perverted mob-boss in his limousine. But only because he has intuited the humanity of the slum’s occupant standing beside him as the sweeping camera records the filth. The single most important fact of Indian poverty is the loss of dignity in the individual. The Indian knows this. The poor are actually caste-ascribed second-rate human beings. Their existence is like that of animals: Their concerns are all immediate because that is the only level at which life engages them. But animals, they are not: That is the essence of Slumdog’s universal reception. Constant humiliation and hunger have acid-doused their dignity. But dignity is congenital; it is innate, though the poor have very little opportunity to enhance it. The boy’s experiences inform the man, incident upon humiliating incident, layer upon undignified layer. But in the end, they do not define Jamal. That is why the man’s character can stand apart from the boy’s life. Jamal Malik, whose mother is killed for her faith, whose friend’s eyes are spooned out so that he can beg better, whose hungry plea society rolls the window up at, is not going to be a disinterested observer of the world. He is the railcar, raindrenched, waif-on-the-run protector who invites an abandoned girl-child to curl up unmolested with him and his brother: Jamal is the little heart-musketeer who does to her what he wished someone would do to him.