It’s so easy to associate plastic surgery with the vain excesses of neurotic celebrities and other vulgar bubbleheads that it’s easy to forget the medical benefits of the practice.

The Oscar-winning documentary short “Smile Pinki” (6 p.m., HBO) offers a wonderfully uplifting story of human generosity and renewed hope.

It also allows this cranky scribe to do something I never thought possible — use “heartwarming” and “plastic surgery” in the same sentence.

Told without narration in a cinema-verite style, “Smile” follows medical volunteers as they scour the streets of the Indian city of Banaras (also known as Varanasi) and outlying villages, looking for children born with cleft lips and palates. They offer their families free surgery and medical care and the chance to start life over.

Almost all of these young patients are born to the poorest of the poor, people who live in tentlike shacks and farmers who seem completely unacquainted with the notion of a telephone.

Most have been ostracized from their schoolmates. Many of the parents have been ordered out of their family for bringing a “monster” into the world.

The film, under 45 minutes, is remarkably simple. Doctors and medical volunteers find patients; hundreds of parents and children arrive at the hospital (some like Pinki and her father walk three days to get there); they get a number and wait in line to undergo an evaluation and then a simple procedure, recover for several days and then go home.

The film concludes with simple scenes of formerly forlorn and outcast children playing with their peers. It’s as simple — and as world-changing — as that.

“Smile Pinki” reflects the real work of the Smile Train, the world’s leading cleft charity, operating in 76 of the world’s poorest countries. They advertise in many newspapers for donations. Maybe even in the one you are reading right now.

• Movies have a way of eclipsing history, gussying up the ugly truth with Hollywood stars and explaining away the random nature of events with a three-act arc. “The Real Bonnie and Clyde” (7 p.m., National Geographic) has some heavy lifting to do. It’s not easy to rewrite a legend starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.

“Real” calls upon witnesses and accounts from Blanche Barrow (you know, the one played by Estelle Parsons) and recently released FBI files to recount their bloody 11-state crime spree.

Tonight’s other highlights

• “So You Think You Can Dance” (7 p.m., Fox) continues.

• Urban archaeology leads to homicide on “CSI: NY” (9 p.m., CBS).

• The head of a charity may have a dark side on “Law & Order” (9 p.m., NBC).

• A shadow of doubt falls on a U.S. Marshall on “The Unusuals” (9 p.m., ABC).

• “Locked Up Abroad” (9 p.m., National Geographic) examines the prison accommodations in Cuba.