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No, this is not yet another article about Slumdog Millionaire.

It is an article about us, those of us who have seen the film as well as those of us who haven’t.

For those of us who have seen the film, one of its most revolting scenes depicts the beggar mafia gouging out the eyes of a child to make him blind, and therefore a better earning beggar. I saw the film twice.

Both times I found myself turning away from the screen; both times I found everyone else doing the same. Those of us who haven’t seen the film, that scene may not play out in all its horror on a big screen, but we too avert our eyes when the truth stares us in the face.

These thoughts came to me when I read about how the Maharashtra government has suddenly started a probe to see if children are indeed maimed by a beggars’ mafia. The sequence of events leading up to the newly instituted inquiry is interesting; an Englishman living in a small town in Britain saw a report in a local paper about the disfiguring and torture of children who then ended up on Mumbai’s streets.

Though neither an activist nor a public figure, the man was upset enough to address the letter to the only person he could think of, the Prime Minister of India.The PM’s office forwarded the letter to the Central Woman and Chilld Welfare Ministry. The Ministry forwarded it to the Maharashtra chief minister. The Maharashtra CM forwarded it to his home department and the State Commission for Protection of Child Right. Since this was presumably the end of the line for forwards, Home and the State Commission decided to conduct an inquiry.

I didn’t know till now that each state has a commission for the protection of child rights. Did you? I didn’t know either that there was a central ministry for women and child welfare. Did you? I suppose we did know vaguely that they existed, but didn’t quite know what they actually did.

It seems that they can’t be doing anything if it required a forward from the PMO for them to inquire whether a beggar mafia exists. And that the children we see begging on the streets, the ones with one arm or one leg, or sometimes with no arms or no legs, or sometimes with a limb that has been stretched till it’s very long and very thin, or sometimes with both eyes missing, weren’t born that way. As it happens, we have suspected it too, but hoped it wasn’t true.

We arenow glorying the success of Slumdog Millionaire, however second-hand our success may be. (After all, it is a British film). Its multiple Oscars have even silenced its critics who slammed it not for cinematic reasons but because the film “exploited poverty”. When they were being vocal, these critics conveniently ignored the fact that nothing that was shown in Slumdog was untrue: the dirt, the squalor, the brutality of slum life is all there for us to see. (In fact the film is shot on location, not in studio re-creations of a slum).

If it shows communal killings, we know that these have happened and will, heaven help us, continue to happen. We deal with these uncomfortable truths by pretending they don’t exist, but averting our eyes doesn’t make them go away, does it?

Perhaps we have no choice. Since there is nothing we can do directly about all this, the easiest way of dealing with the situation is not to look it in the face. But ignoring grim reality can hardly be official policy. Poverty will not disappear overnight and governments can only work long term to alleviate it. But surely, drugging and maiming children is a criminal activity which has to be dealt with in the strictest way and in the very short term. And if the police ignore such blatantly criminal acts, the Home Ministry must take the police to task.

If Slumdog Millionaire stirs our conscience, if our goading then coerces the police into action, if the police action then puts the beggar mafia into jail, the film will have achieved far more than all its Oscars put together.