This essay argues that the overwhelming bourgeoisification of Bollywood's big budget films, which luxuriate in capturing on screen the lives of the rich, does not entail an absolute exclusion of the poor. Rather, these films subtly incorporate and subsume indigent spaces of the city in innovatively insidious ways. Their aim is to neutralize the poor, their sites of residence, and categorically dismiss their rights to the city. In films like Karan Johar's Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Rajkumar Hirani's 3 Idiots the slum (or its substitute) is spatially aestheticized in such a way as to expunge the unsavory smell and ordure of “scenes of poverty.” Or else, poverty is rendered ridiculous; it survives only as comic object, a space and predicament unworthy of our sympathy, and good enough only for our deprecatory laughing dismissal. Poverty is also represented as a relic or holdover from 1950s black and white cinema, which is now mocked as predictable and melodramatic.