Very rarely, a movie based on a book is better than its inspiration. Slumdog Millionaire belongs to this rare category. I watched the flick sometime back and then I got to read the book after it... trust me, the movie came out N times better than the book (N>1).

For those, who don’t have a background, Danny Boyle picked an Indian book named Q&A by Vikas Swaroop and created a master-piece called ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. The movie and the book convey the idea how someone grown up in slums (or you can say in the worst of conditions) won a huge amount in one of the quiz shows and became a suspect of cheating. Now he narrated about how he came to know the answers of the typical questions asked in the show in the course of his run to win the largest amount ever in a quiz show.

In Q&A, the protagonist named Ram Mohammad Thomas is alone in his journey of life. He met various people and events in his life through which he came to know about the answers of each question asked on the quiz. The protagonist was abandoned and a priest from church found him. But the stories behind each question in the show don’t seem very realistic in the book. Also the book doesn’t create the curiosity... you can easily guess what will be the next question deriving from the story and most of the time you find yourself correct.

In Slumdog Millionaire, they didn’t copy the book as it is... Took some question (3-4, which seem realistic)... And altered the story completely. Here the guy is from the slums of Mumbai who lost his mother in some communal riots. He also has an elder brother who always has a command over the protagonist. They also introduced a girl who is always in the centre and the hero (salim here) always looks for her. Eventually, he meets the events that enable him to answer the quiz questions. The storyline for both the book and the movie is less or more similar but the movie creates curiosity.

Also in the book the purpose of the protagonist of attending the quiz show was not only to catch up with big bucks but also to take revenge from the host. The same didn’t happen in the movie. The book is more into relationships but the movie is more into only one relationship LOVE.

Both are good but if you have seen the movie, I don’t think that you will like the book much. Though I met many contradictory posts, which claims the book to be better, I personally felt that in the war between the two, SLUMDOG has an edge over Q&A.