Gandhi (1982), a soufflé of Attenborough’s stars from the West, with some distinctly Indian ingredients in the form of Alyque Padamsee, Roshan Seth, Saeed Jaffrey and Amrish Puri, wowed both international audiences and hard-nosed critics.

The film won eight Oscars and got Kingsley and Rohini Hattangadi, who played Kasturba Gandhi, a BAFTA each. After Gandhi, both actors went as far as they were allowed to by their respective film industries. Kingsley became Sir Ben and acted in films such as Turtle Diary, Bugsy, Schindler’s List, Artificial Intelligence and House of Sand and Fog; Hattangadi is best remembered for her flimsy, tufted-hair, lipstick-on-cheeks portrayal of an evil aunt in Chaalbaaz.

Now, 27 years after Attenborough’s magnum opus — which plays on our TV sets every national holiday — another British filmmaker, armed with another local narrative, a tale of poverty, oppression, aspiration and love, has brought India into the spotlight.

Slumdog Millionaire, quickly appropriated as “our” movie, is up for nine academy awards — having already won four Golden Globes — and India is finding it hard to keep its excitement under check. But is it right for Bollywood and the local media to celebrate it as a coming of age of our 300-titles-a-year cinema? On the contrary, isn’t it proof of the inadequacy or our film industry rather than a monument to it?

Danny Boyle is one of the brightest new directors today. But he doesn’t command an aura like Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. A film by him doesn’t guarantee critical acclaim and box-office riches. He’s created a much smaller appeal for himself by tackling strangely diverse subjects. From the flesh-eating zombies of 28 Days Later to the star-savers of Sunshine, from drug addiction in Trainspotting to the saintly innocence of Millions, Boyle’s films make the 52-year-old director seem 20 years younger because his stories are a reflection of modern life. Boyle’s world is our world, its different facets shown from within, always fresh, never repetitive. For him, the simplicity of our daily grind is both exciting and complicated — no need for James Ivory’s period dramas, Ron Howard’s big-budget biopics, or Quentin Tarantino’s uber-cool preaching.