Chinnamani is like any other eleven-year-old boy—he goes to school, he is passionate about cricket and watches movies on the sly with his friends. The only difference is that this eleven-year-old lives in a slum in Bangalore where drunken domestic tiffs often lead to physical abuse, little children are brought up by their siblings, fifteen-year-old girls are married off with fanfare because they are pregnant, and gods possess men to answer questions about the future. It is a brutal world where men, women and children alike fight a daily battle against a miserable existence. Yet, all of them have one common dream—the dream of a better life, of a day when they too will live in pucca houses on land which they can call their own. Enter Sumathi and Swami, non-government officials working for the development of slums, who tell the slum dwellers that they too have a right to the land on which they live. Chinnamani watches, intrigued, as everybody around him gets caught up in the dream of possessing their own home, and with the self-doubting Selvan as their president, unite to confront apathetic government officials as well as the malevolent and despotic Rowdy Muthu to fight for what should, in truth, belong to them. Deeply rooted in reality, Chinnamani’s World is a disturbing and penetrating yet frequently amusing look at life in an Indian slum.
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