Love is timeless. Love is transcendental. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things.

While the story of Slumdog Millionaire is a raw account of one slum-reared Mumbai teen who becomes a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" and the trauma-drenched life events that help inch him ever closer to the 20 million rupee grand prize, the story is really that of love – which at its purest – is a signature of the divine.

This film, which swept eight Oscars including Best Picture of 2008, was devoid of pretense for it depicted the truth of this steadfast bond reified amid squalor and destitution.

We meet Jamal and Salaam Malik who were made orphans after an attack by Hindu fanatics on their Mumbai slum. At the tender age of eight and five, they were drawn into a life of unscrupulous panhandling made possible by a Father Fagan character who would purposely blind the best kid singers in the bunch so they could help rake in the big bucks.

Even as “poverty became the parent of revolution and crime” for the Malik brothers, we witness early on Jamal’s deep proclivity for love.

Enter Latika, a fellow orphan girl who’s employed by the same Father Fagan character. Jamal has a great affinity for her and regales her with dreamed-up stories of he, she and Salaam living together as Three Musketeers in a gorgeous multi-story mansion far removed from the meanness of indigence and neglect.

Throughout the film, this child-like faith spurs him on – on past his dishonest scams run on tourists at the Taj Mahal, on past separation, reunion, then separation again from Latika, on past his brother’s betrayal and rape of Latika and on to take the coveted seat on India’s most watched game show.

As difficult as it is for a man to rise when his most Christ-like qualities are thwarted by poverty, Jamal Malik rose.

He never once doubted that Latika – who later in the film becomes sexually enslaved by a Mumbai gangster - would escape her life of terror and be joined to him again. He believed that if this television program was the only contact he would hope to have with the woman he loved, then let him be scoffed at and called a slumdog on national TV, let him be beaten to a pulp by investigators who deemed him a cheater, let him endure the miserable uncertainty that accompanied it all.

Still, in the end, they reunite via the “phone a friend” lifeline and later in person at a train yard where their love was lost initially. And, as in a classic Bollywood hit, everyone rejoices over love with a large-scale dance scene at the end.