I'll agree with Mr. Bachchan, partly

We Indians are a proud lot. We should be too, because we're privileged enough to be born in that part of the planet whose evolution to it's present form is not just remarkable but also riveting. It is the land where saints have trod, where the bravest have been born and the wisest interred. The key word though, is privileged.
We middle class, educated, English-speaking, Oscar-loving Indians have grown such a habit of being proud of all things even remotely Indian, that we have all but numbed our brains with it. In fact we Indianise things so that we can be proud of them. Take the example of Sunita Williams: a brilliant lady she is, and I my respect for her remains immense and unmitigated, but really, can we as a nation stake any claim to her success? She is 'of Indian origin', a term that describes most of our present day national heroes, and that means born to an Indian father and Slovenian mother in her home country of the United States, bred there. She set out on her space expedition in an American made craft, with an American team, from American soil. Yes, I'll admit there may have been many more hands of Indian origin involved in the success of that mission, but did that justify the nationalistic euphoria that broke out here, one that would be befitting an entirely Indian mission? And back home, our own home grown Sania Mirza, sweating it out on Indian courts, under the guidance of Indian coaches, in a not so sports-other-than-cricket friendly Indian environment, gets a fatwa for wearing what all women players wear and has her national commitment questioned time and again.
The latest case in point is the movie Slumdog Millionaire. As The Times of India put it, the original novel is written by an Indian, the movie has Indian actors and was shot in India, so that makes it an Indian movie. Alright, that's not hard to buy. It is an Indian movie with the story set in Dharavi, but that's exactly what we should not be proud of. It's a movie of horrors, that follows the lives of two little boys from the slums of Dharavi, orphaned by riots. Some may whine that the movie portrays India in a negative light, but they've missed the point entirely. They worry about what image of India it portrays to the world, which is always limited to the white world.(Agreed, many scenes in the movie, especially the depiction of the police, are distinctly discomforting, but they subscribe to the image that most Indians have of their own country.) Much as we would like to portray India as an emerging superpower to use that over over-used phrase, the fact remains that that kind of poverty and misery very much exist in the shadow of our sky scrapers and lake cities and you can't just wish it away. I certainly wouldn't call it the 'real India', another oft used phrase, but it is definitely a very real part of the real India.
Yet, the movie has won critical acclaim and it definitely is a fine example of film making, and above all, it is a front runner for the Oscars , so we must be proud of it and wear that on the sleeve. So we must ask Dev Patel ridiculous questions such as whether shooting in the in the muck lanes of Dharavi "helped him connect with his roots", to which if he answered in the negative, we all know, he would immediately be labelled racist, conceited, arrogant, traitor and generally an enemy of the state. It must ruffle our feathers that such a film was made by a foreigner, and a gora at that, so we must file cases in court accusing the film makers of insulting all Indians by calling them slumdogs, there by proving at once that we have plenty of time and money at hand. And we must cow down anyone in the industry and who was not a part of the film for expressing views contrary to the prevailing exhilaration.
However, I'd like to believe, and I think it is right, that these varied reactions to the movie are rooted in the common sympathy that we all feel for the under privileged. It is more of a case of people living in denial, rather than a case of being so accustomed to it that we don't care anymore. It's more of being so horrified by it that we want to turn away and run, rather than a case of selfishly deserting a sinking ship. Whatever it is, there are many Indians who valiantly wage a battle to better as many lives as they can. God bless them