Slumdog Millionaire!

"Slumdog Millionaire" won 4 oscars (I saw the downloadable version of movie recently)...

Screenplay: Outstanding is the word, and also does the work of putting India on the world map. We have some great guys in this field (Anurag Kashyap, loved his No Smoking)

Picture: A westerners image of India- poor & hungry people. The movie has timed well with Arvind Adiga's "The white tiger", which is also about the poor destitute India. Maybe here we would want a richer picture of India, demonstrating our progress.

Director: Hats off to Danny Boyle for the film. Super camera and shots. I have seen "Trainspotting", and that is a brilliant film as well.

The last one was for Music. It was great to see AR Rahman, SRK and Anil Kapoor on the stage, a proud moment for India (I'm sure Gandhi would be similarly exciting, but I wasn't around). I hope that it wins at least 4 Oscar from here. Man, you should have seen Anil Kapoor on the stage, he was so pumped up!.

So, why is a movie description featuring in DIgital Marketing blog? I was driving today and while I was reminiscing of these proud moments for India, I also remembered one discussion with an international professional. "Indians don't blog; don't express their opinion", he said, "And that is
the reason why though in the west social media is the new buzzword, in India it has a long way to go."

Consider this...

1. I searched for Slumdog millionaire (from India) a few hours ago, I found only 15k results on Google

2. Blog search in Hindi was more dismal- only 7 results.

3. The reach as a media vehicle (comScore calls these as the conversational media) for blogs is good- Orkut.co.in (12.5 Mln Unique Visitors & 40% reach), Bloggers (8 Mln Unique visitors & 26% reach), wordpress (3.5 Mln Unique visitors & 11% reach). However, actual blogger community is still very small; a rough estimate would be about 50k active bloggers. An old article but you might get some information here...

We might be world's largest democracy, however it seems very few of us have opinions to share. In US elections, Barack Obama was able to move a number of youths through his social media influence. Compare this to our Indian politicians, who don't even have a website to their name. I did find Lal Krishna Advani's blog on the net, http://blog.lkadvani.in/ (it wasn't working that's another story). The sad reality is none of us believe in expressing ourselves and that this opinion will make a difference (come on!)

However, there is a silver lining, blogging is becoming big. Aamir Khan (http://www.aamirkhan.com/) has a blog. I had heard that even Amitabh Bacchan had started blogging, however even after 10 minutes of persistent search I couldn't find it. Akshay Kumar also seems to have a blog (http://akshaykumarblogs.blogspot.com/2007/11/akshay-kumar.html), but doesn't look genuine.

Blogging has started in some way, but has sto still reach the tipping point (borrowed from Malcolm Gladwel :). We still have to go a long way beyond clicks and click through rates and ROIs. Blooging, I believe is the true word of mouth marketing.

FYI, here are some interesting feature on "Slumdog Millionaire"

J Ramanand:
http://passionforcinema.com/arrahman-not-just-madras-bombay-or-dilli/

Rk: http://passionforcinema.com/slumdog-millionaire-kamaal-ki-story/

BomBay Bitch (she does a great job of hammering down our own industry): http://www.bombaybitch.com/site/and_the_award_goes_to___/

Pray with me for Slumdog's oscar win!! But before that please watch the movie; it is releasing on Jan 23rd 2009.

BTW, have you seen the Google's new favicon (small icon in your browser), it's great.

Cheers!