In the film, the main protagonist, a young boy, born and brought up in Mumbai slums and without any formal schooling, correctly answers all questions in a popular quiz show and subsequently is suspected, by the quiz master, to have won by cheating. Later, in a police lock up and under intense interrogation / torture he insists "but I knew the answers". The film revolves around the story of how he acquired this 'knowledge'. It effectively posits two distinct and different types of rationalities; the Instrumental and the Strategic rationalities. The former is based on truth, while the latter is based upon effectiveness. The two protagonists of the story, the quiz master and the contestant, each represent one side of this knowledge divide. While the quiz is founded on the expectation of truth through instrumental rationality Jamal the contestant uses the strategic rationality effectively. There is here an implicit critique of the pedagogical model of instrumental knowledge unquestioningly followed in our educational system.

To deconstruct this story, we will have to rely upon considerable philosophical and epistemological work done by the German thinker Jurgen Hebermas and his thesis of "Communicative Rationality". Rejecting the 'objective reason' as the first, and immutable, principle of much of the Western philosophy, which advanced positivist separation of knowledge and value , Habermas, through a critical appropriation of Weber's analysis, modifies and develops Weber's "largely unclarified concept of rationality. His starting point is the two basic models of Weber's theory of action: the monological and the social, which represent the official and unofficial versions of his typology. Habermas argues that the two Weberian versions represent two clearly distinct frames of social action, in which distinct forms of rationality are developed: one, which equates rationality with a purposive activity of a means/end relationship. Within this frame only a formal sort of rationality could be developed. Thus, it restricts the concept of rationality itself. And two, a rationality based on communication and understanding. At this point, Habermas attempts to expand the concept of reason, and he legitimatizes the functions of its distinct forms. Furthermore, he indicates and describes the forms of rationality that Weber regards as derivatives. Thus, he makes an essential distinction between a rational action that is orientated towards success, such as winning a quiz, and a rational action that aims at reaching understanding.

Rationality is a disposition expressed in behavior for which there are good reasons. These reasons can be arrived at by a rigorous application of inductive or deductive logic as we are taught in our schools. It assumes reason as the 'First Principle" transcending the messy variations of societies and cultures. This rationality operates in a non-social world, which includes "only physical objects and naturally occurring events". This is instrumental rationality aimed at practical goal attained by precise calculations of adequate means. But there is another kind of rationality, as Hebermas, and Weber before him, points out. It is a rationality which implicitly recognizes the social world and is contingent upon the presence of fellow human beings in the context of a given social milieu. This rationality, and the knowledge it engenders, is always contextual. This is communicative rationality; it rests on communication that is "oriented to achieving, sustaining and reviewing consensus - and indeed a consensus that rests on the intersubjective recognition of criticisable validity claims". With this key distinction we shift the emphasis in our concept of rationality from the conceptual to the social.

This is how Jamal 'knew' the answers. Not by acquiring an encyclopedia of information, an essentially linear process of induction/deduction, but by a lateral and existential process of recalling real, concrete events that he has lived through in the context of his own social environment of a slum and with people who has shared those events. His assertion rests on "the intersubjective recognition of criticisable validity claims", which are accepted by a police officer who, due to his proximity and exposure to the slum environment, is sympathetic to the values if not actually shares them. Thus Jamal is a rational, and by implication, a knowledgeable person. As Hebermas says, "We call a person rational who interprets the nature of his desires and feelings in the light of culturally established standards of value, but especially if he can adopt a reflective attitude to the very value standards through which desires and feelings are interpreted." Such a person also needs to be 'free from illusions' and self deceptions. Jamal in the film is all of that.

Is validity relative to cultural values? Or, to put it differently, is truth contingent upon its cultural context? Obviously affirmative answers to these questions would unhinge many of the cherished positions of our educational establishment. These positions are founded on an implicit assumption that the emancipation of the underprivileged can be achieved through uniformity of educational inputs which consists of empirical-analytic sciences and a positivist separation of knowledge and value. Opposed to this are the proponents of interpretive knowledge, which they say "... gives richer, thicker, more meaningful descriptions of the world than positivism". However, there is a catch; one can argue that, the 'pluralism' of the interpretive, qualitative rationality masks the fact that some versions of social reality are ... less legitimate than others for reasons having nothing to do with their truth, beauty, or goodness, such as social relations of domination and oppression. Thus, interpretation, on the one hand, creates possibilities for alternative descriptions of the social reality but, on the other, cannot evaluate these possibilities. It simply represents subjective and sectional descriptions or opinions.

Here again Hebermas provides a way out. His ideas go beyond the objectified monological knowledge or the subjective interpretation of the social reality. They go beyond the 'technical' or 'practical' interests, in order to satisfy a new kind of interest - the emancipatory interest. This is a core concept of the critical social sciences and critical pedagogy as well. However, Habermas makes it clear that this particular kind of interest incorporates both "technical" and "practical" interests that respectively define cognitive-instrumental/strategic and moral-practical rationalities.

According to Habermas , the emancipatory interest, through self-reflection, provides possibilities for a) the transformation of the "ideologically frozen forms of dependence" which confirms the extant power relations, and b) for a critique of the subjective conditions of knowledge, "where reason can self-reflexively come to grasp the universal and necessary conditions" of knowledge. This second possibility provides universal standards, in order to liberate the subject from his/her subjective interests. It obviously attempts to provide validity and evaluative criteria. This is of particular interest to us in India as in recent times "knowledge with values" has acquired a menacing sectarian meaning. Thus, by introducing the notion of "universal standards" Habermas' writings legitimatize human interests while at the same time, attempt to restrict their distortive functions.