Another Slumdog Millionaire In the Making?

Since 2005, Q&A, a novel by a seasoned Indian diplomat, Vikas Swarup, has conquered bookshelves. It is undeniably a highly readable  novel, structured in a witty way and fast-paced: I still remember reading it back-to-back on a single train journey, not being able to take my eyes away until I reached the last page. The book’s success was multiplied in 2008 when Danny Boyle turned it into a popular movie called Slumdog Millionaire.

Swarup subsequently wrote The Accidental Apprentice, published in 2013. In 2015, both Swarup and his latest novel went a step further in their respective lives. Swarup became the spokesperson for the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while Sriram Raghavan, an Indian movie writer and director, announced that he is planning to make a film based on The Accidental Apprentice. Deepika Padukone, one of Bollywood’s contemporary hottest stars, was poised to play the main role.

Yet now, at the end of 2016, there's little news of the movie's progress. It may be time for a reality check: can The Accidental Apprentice really be another Slumdog Millionaire?

Swarup has a talent for arousing readers’ curiosity. The novel starts with an Indian everyman – in this case, an everywoman by the name Sapna Sinha – being approached by a rich, famous, and successful company owner. The strange man, called Vinay Mohan Acharya, offers the protagonist a once-in-a-lifetime chance: she may try to pass his seven tests and if she does, she will become his company’s CEO, thus becoming rich and powerful within weeks.

Having revealed so much at the very start, the author makes sure that together with Sapna we will long remain unsure about Acharya’s true identity, his real motives, and, most interestingly, which events in her life constitute the preplanned tests. For Sapna, the challenge not only checks her thinking, analyzing, negotiating, and deciding skills but becomes an experience in learning about life and revising her moral values. It is certainly no coincidence that Acharya’s surname means “teacher.”

The Accidental Apprentice has the same strengths as Q&A: you can (or perhaps even have to) read it on a single, cold autumn evening; the author has command over the plot; the dialogues are full of witty observations. Just like Q&A/Slumdog Millionaire, the main plot is based on a series of subplots, or, to be more precise, on a series of stories that refer to different topics but follow the adventures of the same protagonist. For a non-Indian reader, these stories may be as important or even more important than the main storyline, as they introduce one to various aspects of today’s India. With this structure, the novel would actually work as a short TV series as well, with every chapter becoming one episode. Yet, the story has a rather fast pace and is not too elaborate, so it certainly is a material which can be easily converted into a movie script. At the risk of jumping to conclusions, I would even assume that the book was written as if taking into consideration that it could become a movie one day.

Yet the novel has same weaknesses. First of all, not all the stories on which the main plot is built are that convincing. While using a very similar narrative frame, Swarup certainly made sure that no story in The Accidental Apprentice was similar to those in Q&A. From this perspective, the book is fresh material. It is also updated: with every story the author made a reference to the headline-hitting events and processes of India in the last years, as if continuing Q&A not in the sense of the story but with regards to Indian contemporary history (but with no politics).

At times, however, the book seems to be chasing popular topics rather than those the author finds amusing or interesting. The story that makes a reference to the Rights to Information (RTI) law campaign reads like a statement: RTI is good and it benefits the citizen. There is nothing bad about any author making such statements, but it in this case it was delivered too simply, too directly, affecting the subtlety of the plot.

The chapter that deals with the issue of “honor killings,” arranged marriages, and the social control of caste councils (called panchayats or khaps in northern India) left me with an awkward feeling. In that story, the protagonist enters an Indian village to learn, for the first time in her life, how much the caste councils control the lives of the local community members. Thereupon we are fed with definitions and explanations that look lifted straight from the pages of Indian English-language newspapers for the middle class, or even from the BBC or CNN. It is clear that the hero of the novel, being an educated, lower-middle class urban citizen herself, does not really understand rural India but the social world of Indian villages is explained to her (and to us) in such a school-like fashion that the chapter reads more like an essay than a story. In contrast, the chapter in Q&A that dealt with the private life of a Bollywood star read like an insider’s story that could have been (and most possibly was) based on real people and real events but still worked great just as a story. Reading it, I did not feel like I was being lectured on the basics of Bollywood biographies by an expert.

Secondly, The Accidental Apprentice is just too similar to Q&A. Let’s quickly sum up: the hero is a common person that has to pass a chain of tests to achieve a great success and each test opens up one box with a story on India’s dire social reality. The novel’s plot is inspired by a Western TV show. Did I just summarise Q&A, Slumdog Millionaire, or The Accidental Apprentice? Well, all of them. The main difference is that in The Accidental Apprentice Sapna Sinha, contrary to the protagonist of Q&A, is not a “slumdog,” having a considerably higher start in life (I will skip other plot similarities and dissimilarities to avoid bigger spoilers).

Just as Q&A was obviously inspired by the Who Wants to be Millionaire TV game show, The Accidental Apprentice, both in name and story, clearly refers to The Apprentice. The Accidental Apprentice’s creator, as noted above, is now a spokesman for the Indian Foreign Ministry and one of The Apprentice’s creators is soon to be the U.S. president. The Accidental Apprentice is simply a tested formula. This, of course, is not unusual; why would an author abandon a successful style?

But does it make The Accidental Apprentice an unlikely basis for a film? To the contrary. Many books are bound to lose subplots, characters, or even the main storyline while being adapted to the silver screen. The Accidental Apprentice, on the other hand, is perfectly fit to become a movie. While the lecture-like explanations mentioned above would work even less in a movie, they could be better conveyed visually rather than word-for-word.

Further, it’s heartening that this time Swarup’s novel may be turned into a film by an Indian director, even if it impacts its chances of the movie achieving international success. Sriram Raghavan admitted that he could not “get the rights” to adapt Q&A, so now he has his chance with The Accidental Apprentice.

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire was not completely un-Indian in its feeling and setting; but rather than just adapt Q&A completely, the movie creators used the main frame but came up with different stories. Some of the additions were awkward and it was clear the movie had not been made by Indians. For example, the initial scene showing a child’s swim through feces (as if saying: India is really so filthy and we are being so realistic about it) works rather strangely with the final dance sequence (as if saying: we are also making a sweet dance-and-love Bollywood movie, kind of).

With Sriram Raghavan at the helm, I would not expect The Accidental Apprentice to be a hyper-realistic movie (and it can hardly be one with the original storyline as a starting point). Yet I assume it would have a different feel than Slumdog Millionaire and would represent an Indian interpretation of a novel that deals with different aspects of Indian reality. It is also an injustice of sorts than an Indian novel can only be reborn as an internationally acclaimed movie if it is adapted by Europeans or Americans. All in all, I do hope that The  Accidental Apprentice will be adapted one day and I wish it will become another Slumdog Millionaire not in the sense of taking the same form but in a sense of a Bollywood movie achieving huge international success.