The big winner at last night's Golden Globes, Slumdog Millionaire, succeeds at levels that almost certainly never entered into the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's calculus when they voted awards for the film, its director, its screenplay and its score. They were almost certainly most focused on the extraordinarily compelling stories of its main characters, the quality of the film-making, the deft structure, acting, directing, the usual stuff of movie-making. But the film captures the life and the spirit of Mumbai and of much of India, depicts a world alien to most in America who will see it, and at the same time both captures and, through its own success worldwide, illustrates the transformation not just of its of its leading character, Jamal, but of his ever-present co-star, modern India itself. 

Juxtaposing the brutal poverty of Mumbai's slums with the glitter and promise of a global television phenomenon like "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?", the film offers a kind of energizing fugal counterpoint that is full of hope and at the same time condemnation of the gaps that divide the poorest from the globalizing world. Jamal, like all picaresque heroes, becomes our guide, introducing us first to the crushing poverty of the world into which he was born and then to the steps he takes up the path he and his brother follow in search first of survival and later of more rewarding lives. It is almost inevitable that such an evocation of contemporary India must lead him through a job in a call center...just as his ultimate deliverance through his performance on the game show places him in the most global setting possible because it is also the most culturally denuded setting possible. The world is never flatter (which is to say more two dimensional) than it is on an international game-show hit. His use of a cell phone as a lifeline in the game echoes the role that modern technology is playing in transforming the world of even the poorest. The scene in which he and his brother stand atop sky scrapers that overlook what once was the slum from which they came also speaks to the stunning degree of the changes sweeping their country, even as the brother's enrichment as a cog in a gangster's empire comments on the mixed bag that rapid prosperity brings with it. (As the recent scandal at Satyam also illustrates.)

But beyond the effectiveness of the structure in which each chapter of his life is linked to a question he faces on "Millionaire," beyond the way the story provides a window into many of the themes central to an Indian transformation that echoes Jamal's, what is most potent and ultimately transcendent about the movie are the scenes of Jamal, his brother Salim and Jamal's life-long love Latika as children facing brutality and the very worst hands fate can deal us with extraordinary hope, with laughter, and with inextinguishable vitality. They should despair. But they always believe there is something more. It's this spirit, which I have seen in every struggling corner of the planet and which I feel in particular animates all of India that is so indelible and telling. That anyone should ever suffer as so many children do -- and roughly 40,000 die every day of preventable causes worldwide -- is inexcusable but that it does not crush them and still these great countries are finding a path to elevate themselves is the story and the great hope of the 21st century. (And their fate is our greatest responsibility.)

When I saw the film, just over a week ago, I left the theater wondering to myself about the way that international affairs are covered in the media or discussed in Washington. Most of the stories we write are about leaders, presidents and congresses, about policies and summits, about strategies and budgets. Every so often, in a war, we capture a shot of an injured child or weeping mother, but we miss the essence of it all, the stories of individual people. India is no more about its Prime Minister or even a terrible tragedy like the recent terror attacks in Mumbai than it is about the exceptional triumphs of its business leaders or writers. It is for me perhaps the most compelling of the places I know on the planet precisely because it is impossible to categorize or reduce to a simple taxonomy. And as the movie suggests (or as does the exceptionally rich artistic output of the country, from Bollywood to an extraordinary array of novelists living in India or of Indian origin) it is truly a country of a billion powerful individual human stories, of people coping with poverty and change, propelled by their own aspirations and buffeted by fate and the peccadilloes of others.

In today's world, most of the contacts between countries are between such individuals. Most of the stories of globalization that are truly interesting are their stories. Most of the problems that ought really to rise to top our priority lists are the challenges they face. And yet, when I read articles in policy journals or when I hear diplomats speak, I feel they are absent or they are only invoked as rhetorical devices, for political reasons. One Slumdog Millionaire -- a piece of fiction with an improbable outcome -- offers more truth about some of the great changes transforming the world than any of the best sellers written on the subject could hope to, intellectually brilliant as any of them might be. Academics seek to find algorithms or paradigms, patterns to suggest a bigger picture. But history is a fabrication as a result, gross oversimplifications of billions of complex component parts. It's a cliché, for example, to say that there are many Indias, but an absurdity to suggest that there is one monolithic whole or that the challenges India faces as a country are the same as other nations classified as "emerging." I'll take the movie anytime over a lifetime subscription to Foreign Affairs, it having delivered more insight into one of the great issues of our time than that grey sleep aid has in all the years I have been receiving it.

In the same vein, only nowhere nearly as sensitive and noble...

It strikes me as awards season unfolds in Hollywood, that Washington has come up short on that front. After all, Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. Surely, we deserve our own awards shows more than all those rich glamorous types in Hollywood who seldom face crises bigger than whether or not to tempt the paps by taking an outside table at the Ivy. So, just as I suggest to the proprietors of this site that they actually consider writing foreign policy articles about real people and sparing the world more wonk's-eye-view perspectives, let me suggest that they, other bloggers on this site, or the readers of this site make an effort and come up with some meaningful awards for America's second-favorite community of ego-maniacal, publicity-obsessed screw-ups.

There are many ways to tackle this. There are no right answers. (Just please, don't be serious. The primary real-life similarity between Washington and Hollywood is that both communities have raised the art of self-congratulation to a science. When it comes to egos, unlike economies, deflation is healthy.) Particularly given that we are at the end of eight years of George W. Bush's box office magic, couldn't we come up with a few distinctions to dispense?

Best performance by a neo-con in an insupportable role (Doug Feith, going away, I think). Least-likely neocon sex symbol (Paul Wolfowitz, of course). The vampire award for the man least likely to show up on film (Steve Hadley is a shoe-in). Best performance by an acronym (for the cover-up that was TARP). The George Michael Award for Regular Public Fellatio (to MSNBC for its coverage of the Obama campaign). The You'll Never Work in This Administration Again Award for Unappreciated Candor (a three way tie between Gen. Jay Garner, Gen. Eric Shinseki and Larry Lindsay). Most Surprising Performance by a Currency in a Leading Role (definitely the dollar). Lifetime Achievement Award for Getting Out Before We Could Take Back the Lifetime Achievement Award (Alan Greenspan). 

You get the idea. It's fun. Try it at home. Or post it here.

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