This is not to say that the slums are not physically squalid and oppressive. They are. If anything, they are worse than you might imagine from the film. Its slum scenes, powerful and painful though they are, simply cannot convey the feel of the grit on your skin and the acrid smoke and fumes that assault your eyes. Most of all, you cannot imagine the smells. I found that the prevailing odour was not that of excrement, except when I passed an open drain or one of the evil-looking sewage-filled canals. It was the overpowering stench of rotting rubbish. In an older, more established section of the Antop Hill slum, a young bearded man in a clean white kurta pyjama introduced himself as Taj Mohammed, a local leader and third-generation resident. He showed us around his neighbourhood, beginning with the public lavatory and ending with one of three back-street cinemas. All the concrete or brick buildings were raised a few feet above the ground to protect the inhabitants from monsoon flooding. "The toilet costs two rupees. The video costs 10 rupees," he said. (A standard bus fare is three rupees - and there are about 70 rupees to the pound.) There were many signs advertising mobile phones. Echoing the film, which he had not seen, he said: "This is the heart of India."

The ubiquity of the slums and their importance to the city's economy makes it all the more bizarre that their brief and sanitised depiction in a successful, award-winning Indo-British film should have provoked howls of protest as well as enthusiastic reviews. One academic was widely quoted as saying that Slumdog was "the white man's imagined India. It's not quite snake charmers, but it's close." Film producer Arindam Chaudhuri wrote that it is "just every scrap of dirt picked up from every corner and piled up together to try and hit back at the growing might of India."

It is of course true that the film "distorts reality". Latika, sold to a pimp at 12, would be unlikely to remain a virgin so far into her teens. While it is no distortion to depict homeless children becoming the slaves of beggar-masters, and the blinding of children to become more effective beggars certainly happened in the past, such maiming is said to be much less common today. Perhaps the ultimate distortion of the film is the standard movieland way it shows good triumphing over evil.