But show it he did, and now his hit movie is drawing flak for depicting India as a 'Third World dirty underbelly developing nation' and causing 'pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots', as Bollywood demigod Amitabh Bachchan put it.

Meanwhile, other critics are getting huffy for the opposite reason. They say the rags-to-riches story - in which Dev Patel plays a poor boy who becomes a contestant on the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? - romanticises life in the capital's shanty towns. In other words, it does not show quite enough poverty.

Slumdog Millionaire, which has earned 10 Oscar nominations, opens in Singapore on Thursday.

In a one-on-one interview in December, before the movie began winning awards like they were going out of style, Life! asked the British director if his slickly shot fairytale might have glossed over the grimness of it all.

'We tried to make it as gritty as possible, so you saw some of the reality of it,' he says. 'But when you're working in the slums, the one thing they say is: 'Don't show that we're poor, will you?' Because when you come from a poor background, you want to show how you aspire to something different.'

And that, he says, is what he wanted to capture: the energy and spirit that can be found in the slums, which are home to half of Mumbai's 16 million residents.

'They have this phrase there: 'Nobody starves in India'. And they are very proud of that, because although the people live in poverty, they are saved by the community if they get in real trouble,' he says.

In any case, he did not set out to make a radical social documentary about the slums.

'It's about the human spirit more than about the detail of poverty and I'm very proud that we made it like that. Because I actually think people from the slums would really enjoy it if they ever get to see it.'

Read the full report in Wednesday's edition of The Straits Times' LIFE!