Welcome to your destiny, Latika.  All 8 uncut inches of it.  Fate truly is a sexy mistress.

Director Danny Boyle, in Mumbai this week to promote the Indian release of Slumdog Millionaire (trailer, review), refuted charges that his film glamorizes poverty, saying it was meant to capture Mumbai’s “lust for life.”

About half of Mumbai’s 17 million people are homeless, and many of those live on the streets or in slums that lack even basic facilities such as running water and toilets.

Some Indian newspapers and TV channels have criticized Boyle for romanticizing slums and peddling such grim realities as begging rackets, prostitution and crime as “Indian exotica.”

The film has sparked a debate on whether such “poverty porn” reinforces Western stereotypes about the country.

“If (Slumdog) projects [sic] India as Third World dirty underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations,” Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan, arguably India’s biggest superstar, wrote on his blog last week. [THR]

So I guess the root of their complaint is that the film was set in India.  And anyway, it easily could’ve been written by Charles Dickens.  The head of the begging racket in the film was a guy who blinds orphans so they can beg more money.  How different is that from Cruella DeVille?   Mua-haha, these Hadji pelts will make me a fine coat, I say.