HOWZAT

This is where the 200 prints of Slumdog initially being released in India will be shown.

Then there are the 7,000 traditional single-screen cinemas, still known as "talkies", found across the country. Known for their conservative tastes, there had been concerns that Slumdog, directed by a Briton, would prove too avant gard for them. In the past fornight, however, the release of a trailer that emphasised the film's "masala "

(or "spicy") credentials has persuaded experts that it is poised for popular success in India. "It looks to have emotion, drama, songs, dance, romance: all the trappings of Bollywood," Taran Adarsh, a leading critic, said. "The single screens would be crazy not to show it."

Finally, in the slums themselves one finds establishments like Mr Alangur's – the so-called "mini theatres": tiny cinemas tucked away in dingy rooms, hidden from view. Completely illegal and utterly ingenious, they usually show pirate versions of western action movies and Hindi potboilers, often on DVD or VHS. The typically clandestine atmosphere of Mr Alangur's theatre is such that it could almost be a den offering a narcotic – rather than a cinematic – escape from real life. Tickets here cost 15 rupees, compared to several hundred in the multiplexes.

The price is designed to be within the reach of the real slumdogs and Mr Alangur's mini theatre is surrounded by real-life scenes that mirror those depicted in the film.

If there is a global slowdown underway, nobody has told the estimated one million inhabitants of Dharavi. On any weekday afternoon, Asia's largest slum, a sprawling square mile of conjoined tin roofs and blue tarpaulin-topped shacks, is a blur of activity.

It may be one of the world's poorest neighbourhoods, but Dharavi is said to host a USD 1 billion-a-year economy. Capitalism, red in tooth and claw, is thriving. Every few yards, pedestrians must skirt trucks laden with cheap consumer goods vans and dodge the detritus associated with building work – piles of discarded rubble, bricks, sand. In the butchers' shops, cages full of greasy-looking live chickens nervously eye neighbouring wracks of bloody axes. Around charcoal braziers, men chat and bite at blackened corn cobs with blackened teeth.

In the alleyways that lead to Mr Alangur's cinema, the odours meander from the savoury smell of samosas simmering in vats of bubbling oil to the outright wreak of human faeces. The background notes, as is common across Mumbai, are made up of a curiously constant smell of drying fish.

The tiny theatre is upstairs, reached by a rickety set of stairs.

Inside, the booming soundtrack from a Bollywood melodrama, which is being projected onto a screen on the wall of one end of the room, contends with the whir of half a dozen fans overhead. At 4pm, the cinema – a room about 20 feet by 20 feet is packed with about 30 punters, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

New arrivals use the light femitted by their mobile phone screens to avoid treading on their fellow audience members – or falling down the perilously steep steps. Next door, in an even smaller room, a small television is showing a video of Bullet Proof Monk, a Hollywood action film from 2003, dubbed into Hindi.

This would be where the fictional Jamal, who survives on his wits through scams and petty crime, would come to watch a film. In Slumdog Millionaire, he becomes a folk hero among Mumbai's slum dwellers through his television appearances and general knowledge skills. The character will have to win over Mr Alangur if he's to do the same thing in the real city.

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