My early mornings (read: between 7.30 am and 8.30 am) are plagued by an unlikely terrorist: the woman who comes to collect garbage.

She arrives – I have heard through the thick mists of sleep – dragging a large bin-on-wheels out of the elevator. The residents of the first few apartments that fall on her way to the end of the corridor – where my door stands obstinately closed and latched from inside – dutifully put their garbage bins out so that she does not have to waste any time waiting for them. I, however, refuse to comply. And there are reasons why.

a) My garbage bin does not have a lid, making it a tempting playground for crows. Result: Garbage strewn in the corridor. Very embarrassing, specially when the neighbour is kind enough to clean it up, knowing well enough that I am asleep.

b) I have tried improvised covers for the said bin. This proved to be a good deterrent for the crows alright, but the woman threw it away with the garbage.

c) I could get a new bin – with a cover – but I would not know what to do with the old one.

Hence my bin remains lidless. Consequently, I don’t put it out before going to bed.

Now back to the woman. She is the best alarm clock one could ask for. There is sharp clack! on the door with the latch, followed by a high-pitched voice demanding “Kachraa!” that never fails to stun the sleep out of me. This is often accompanied by equally high-pitched shrieks of “Baahar nikal ke rakkho… itna time nahi hai.”

What happens in the next few seconds needs to be recalled in slow motion – it is usually too fast for my groggy brain to register. I jump out of bed, run to the kitchen, grab the garbage bin by it’s rim, run back to the door, open it, look out – hoping that she has not decided I was taking up too much of her time and left – and hand it over. She will stomp over to her bin-on-wheels stationed near the elevator, empty my bin into it, stomp back and thump down the bin by my feet while I try to look a little less sleep-deprived and glance unseeingly over the newspapers. I think I have even caught her disapproving glances – how could I still be sleeping when the all the world is up and about etc etc.

I put the bin in the kitchen, fall back into bed and go to sleep as my heart stops racing.

I have not seen Slumdog Millionaire as yet. But right now, what I find intriguing in the reaction it has generated – and I don’t mean the awards here – and the reaction to that reaction.

The first reaction I read to the film was a letter in a tabloid. It said that Hollywood directors should be banned from filming movies in India that show the country in poor light (read: poverty, squalor, slums, horrifying living conditions and the likes). I laughed off the letter, thinking its writer to be blinkered.

Now, the same sentiment has been echoed by the Big B and that, in turn, has invited a scathing response from The Guardian.

Sometime back, a friend was gifted Heat and Dust (by Ruth Prawer) and she said that she could not go through more than the first few pages because she did not like to read about the filth and squalor in India, specially written by a non-Indian. I quite liked the book. Who wrote it made no difference. If India has filth and squalor, we are hypocritical to pretend it is otherwise.

So, it seems that I can quite well look reality in the eye without squirming.

Well, then. In 2005, on a trip to Singapore, I had two women for company. And most of the time that we were out with our Singaporean tour guide – marveling at our sanitized surroundings – the women copiously bitched about how filthy India is. I was nettled no end but held my peace. I could not bear the idea of bitching about my country to a foreigner, no matter how true it was.

I had argued – to someone else later – that there is a difference between complaining about family members to someone else in the family and bitching about them to strangers. The first is acceptable, the latter not.

So, where do I stand now?

Decades before Danny Boyle made Slumdog, there was Pather Panchali – portraying abject poverty in rural India. It was instrumental in getting Satyajit Ray his Oscar. We didn’t complain about that. Mira Nair got the Bafta and was nominated for an Oscar for Salaam Bombay – showing the lives of Bombay street children (and we know exactly how rosy that can be) – and we didn’t complain about that either. The number of National Awards given for ‘realistic portrayal’ of India (riots, death, the caste system adding to the poverty and filth) are endless.

So what is the problem with Slumdog? Is it because it shows the world what we’d rather hide and ignore? Or is it because it’s a non-Indian who’s doing it?