Shubh Mangal Saavdhan: British sex comedy in desi milieu Jaljeera with Whiskey.

Can Indians laugh at themselves? The answer is finally yes. I loved"Shubh Mangal Saavdgan"  - an unlikely  comedy of manners and behavioural idiosyncrasies in a society transitioning from a moribund sanskari inertia to a more liberated value system.  It is tough to blend British style sex comedy with a small town Indian milieu, but director R.S. Prasanna, who earlier made this movie in Tamil, pulls it off,aided by earthy UP-meets-NewDelhi dialogues. This is what happens when mausis and tayajis meet malls and multiplexes in an age of feminism and the Internet.

Rangoon: Epic Meets Masala. Yeh Kya Ho Gaya Saala?

There is always a challenge for makers of period films as they engage a current audience with a journey to the past. Is theirs an effort a fantastic one to recreate as authentically as possible the reality of a bygone age or is a bygone reality a muse upon which to construct a fantasy of  dubious authenticity? Vishal Bhardwaj’s Rangoon is largely on the latter side. It has already been slammed by leading critics but could do with a treatment that deserves more sympathy than the amount he has extended to his characters. It is a magnificent effort, with much to admire and celebrate but served in a manner that can understandably underwhelm critics and audiences alike.  Nevertheless, it is watchable for it has efforts on nearly everyone’s part that is rare in Bollywood – starting with the very simple fact that we have not seen Indian cinema offer much of World War II in the digital era with its immense possibilities – not counting the occasional Madras Pattinam in Tamil or  Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s “1942: A Love Story. The latter is remembered more as Rahul Dev Burman’s  Last Hurrah than a path-breaker in period cinema.

Bhardwaj’s first fault -- if one might call it that -- is that he has made movies that have raised our expectations. “Maqbool”, “Omkara” and “Haider” with their magnificent interpretations of Shakespearean themes raises one’s appetite. Rangoon has warts that show up bigger like a small meal after a series of fine appetisers.

Rangoon, to start with, has no shot of Rangoon – and I was hoping to see a pagoda shot or Bahadur Shah Zafar’s tomb alongside Kangana Ranaut. But that is not to be.

However, there is much to celebrate in the movie that critics have underemphasized. Glorious outdoor shots of Shahid Kapoor and Kangana Ranaut locked in a sandy romance are set in templates that are classically period. Cinematographer Pankaj Kumar romances steam engines fuming black smoke across lush green landscapes, relentless rain in tropical foilage infested with leeches and lizards, bamboo huts, rope bridges, sepia-toned bombings and air raids. Maharajahs and sundry wives in princely costumes give us plenty of time travel.

Bhardwaj's audacity in trying to combine Julia, a takeoff on Fearless Nadia, with the struggles of the Indian National Army is enriched by a characteristic use of a vulnerable woman torn between two lovers as a metaphor for a nation struggling between moderate and extreme efforts to seek Independence from British imperialism. Like a nation that has to choose between going with a colonial power or partnering with a racist Nazi aggressor in its quest to find an identity and freedom, Julia struggles, despite her penchant for stunts – as one weakened by her dominating lover and her own fluttering heart that flows kindness at the drop of a hat and shows gratitude to a strong-arm saviour.

There is plenty in the film that brings us memories of classic cinema. General Harding with his ruthless mannerisms who reminds us of Colonel Saito in David Lean’s “Bridge On the River Kwai” (the ultimate Burma movie).  There is a colourful dance scene for cheering soldiers clearly inspired by Coppola’s Suzie Q shots in “Apocalpyse Now.”  The sand and the mud rolls are like Oliver Stone’s “Platoon”  and the propeller-driven air raids are so quaint that you love them.

Kangana Ranaut as Julia, Shahid Kapur as army man Nawab Malik and Saif Ali Khan as film maker Russi Billimoria give their best (and a doff of the hat for some beautifully shot interiors of a Parsi home with all the costumes).

But, but, but…

At some point, there is a line from Saif that seems to speak for the director: “Hum funkaar hain: jhooth ko sachhai se jeena hamara pasha hai” (We are artists. To live the lie honestly is our profession).

And we want to ask: Dear Vishal, have  you?.

The script is too laboured and there is a point where the labour falls into the trap of trying too hard – particularly because there is plenty of compromise in the basic soul of the story in dialogues that sound so multiplex that we are constantly jolted to the present. 

The music and lyrics are too folksy to be classic. Some outsourcing might have lightened the burden on the director. This is not a low-budget Gulzar-and-Vishal heart-tug show for the genteel, patronisingly cerebral middle class. This one is an intended epic for posterity.

Do you wear a tuxedo with Kolhapuri chappals?

 There was no ear-worm that I could spot, only the "Bloody Hell" bit that has helped Rottweiler critics.

Weaned on Greek theatre and Shakespearean dramas that set characters with tragic flaws in shades of grey, we look for the director’s tragic flaw, which turns out to be his obsession with tragedy. You can’t go overboard with a stretched climax on a rope bridge with a Romeo-Juliet kind of drama that seems Maudlin, and worse, depressing. Here is an audience that regularly buys large buckets of overpriced popcorn to celebrate Rajkumar Hirani’s overdose of high-school optimism. Do we need this cross-continental, anachronic obsession with tragedy?

O Tempora!

And so, like Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar we may call Rangoon an honourable film. Friends weaned on his Haider, Romans who have relished Hollywood classics and countrymen brought up on happy endings may each have something to grumble about.

 But Rangoon has to be admired still for its guts, ambition, cinematography and fine editing.

Take a deep breath and rewind and taste the movie in your memory, and there is a lot to celebrate. When General Harding speaks English, he sounds authentic, but when he spouts Ghalib in a faux accent, you know it is Bollywood. Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai!
 -- Madhavan Narayanan

Pronounced bowels and digestible consonants: Piku

There is only so much you can guffaw when the bowel is a muse.
But beyond the ablutions lie the intuitions that provide a richer variety of humour.
Piku is brilliant. Beyond its toilet humour lies a sense of character and souls trapped in a rubble of conditioned habits and ways of the flesh. The richness of cultures ingrained and established is nothing when worlds collide between souls in search of harmonious understanding. Writer Juhi Chaturvedi excels in a matrix where characters are stripped naked of their habits and social mannerisms to a point where you see the constant permanent over the variables of everyday idiosyncrasies. Shoojit Sircar's ability to weave in little oddities and rich textures of culture within single-frame detail and short-lived gestures is amazing.
We are quite used to excellence from Amitabh Bachchan, but he can excel himself sometimes -- and the more weird the character, the more is his ability extract the juice of mannerisms, twitches and eccentricities. 

Irffan Khan, by now Bollywood's uncrowned king of understated elegance, can somehow combine the ruffianesque with the sensitive as only he can do, it seems.

But what is fascinating alongside is Deepika Padukone's ability to retain a sense of modern, independent, aesthetic style even as she sinks into a messy role that reflects a character steeped in the hallowed weight of traditions and responsibilities beyond what her tender shoulders might permit. Some things, when chewed well, can be very digestible and delicious.

Calcutta Remixed, with some overcooking - Detective Byomkesh Bakshi (mini review)

Trams and hand rickshaws. Japanese agents and Chinese gangs. British power and Bihari workers. Murders, betrayals and shaky notions of love, loyalty and idealism. Dibakar Banerjee uses Detective Byomkesh Bakshi's thriller-sleuthing as a wonderful excuse to capture the dynamic 1940s in Calcutta, when Imperial lines and impoverished Indians crossed path in an ugly global game that involved opium peddlers, street politics and conspiracies of many hues. The movie is a magnificent high for a Bollywood Renaissance, but its end is overcooked, giving us a David Lean like period feel with a questionable aroma of the blood-and-psycho realism of a Tarantino.  And the use of disco and rock occasionally in the soundtrack is a jarring throwforward in a nostalgic high.
Costume design (inlcuding some by Manoshi Nath) give an authentic feel in a strange aesthetic that involves worn out cottons, long dhotis, Raj-era uniforms and loincloths amid mildewed walls and industrial machinery. And K Venugopal Menon's daughter plays female lead in a role that reminds you somehow of Smita Patil. Classic wine in multiplex bottle.

Crazy art with desi heart: the importance of Happy New Year

'In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.'

-       Bertolt Brecht

 When critics belonging to a narrow clique sharpen their claws to rip apart a successful Bollywood film, they usually sink their steely knives into their own social and emotional illiteracy. Farah Khan, on the other hand, thrives on precisely these literacies that define the structure of such cinema. But where she scores as an artiste (yeah, right), is in the robust creativity with which she approaches what is disparagingly called the Formula Film. 

Ms Khan turns the formula into a cult celebration and cliches into raw material with which she weaves a patchwork quilt of dubious aesthetic but colourful originality. She turns escapism into an act of self-conscious evolution. She turns enjoyment into an introspection of sorts. She makes a thinking film for the feeling types who do not know how to think. Her formula to achieve this is to convert the conventional formula into a spoof so that you can have an out-of-the-body experience: you know you are watching a film even as you are immersed in it. You feel a fictional narrative woven into a Bollywood documentary that becomes a toolkit of the stereotypes, mannerisms, situations and cult lines. It is an experience in which you jump in and out of the movie with a dolphin intelligence – the way dolphins jump in and out with amphibian aplomb in one of the scenes of Happy New Year, her latest work.

Happy New Year clearly defines its ground with several cult lines, the most audible of which is a simple statement: There are only two kinds of people in this world: winners and losers. If we look hard enough, the trick to produce a Bollywood winner is to focus on the losers as an audience, and give them a feeling of being winners in an immersive experience.

So we have identifiable characters: the cowardly, liquor-loving Mumbai “Ghati” Nandu Bhide (Abhishek Bachchan), the rugged northern workman Jag (Sonu Sood), the South Bombay “Bawa” Tammy (Boman Irani), and the bar dancer Mohini (Deepika Padukone) in the company of more urbane losers:  the English speaking, entrepreneurial Charlie (Shah Rukh Khan) and the Uncool Geek Rohan who won’t get a date but will happily hack into powerful computers to prove a point (Vivaan Shah).

The Diamond Heist is an old formula. So is the hero’s revenge for the wrong that visited his father by the villain.  What works in Happy New Year is the way diamonds can be turn into a metaphor: For the geek, a Wall Street IPO is it.  For a Marathi speaking girl from the dingy lanes of Parel, it could be winning a reality show that rewards her dancing skills. For Charlie-like anti-hero hucksters, it may be small business. When various skills come into a collective experience, it even connects with nationalism. At a deeper level, Happy New Year could be a subliminal tribute to the social dynamics that took a tea-seller to the prime minister’s chair in the year of its release. After all, building a coalition of political supporters is just like making a hit Bollywood film: a hundred crore people there, a hundred crore rupees here.

HNY’s biggest secret is the plot-less plot that indirectly asks questions that need to be asked: Why must every film necessarily mimic reality or try to craft a realistic pattern? Indeed, why must it even try to be real? Why can’t it celebrate the dark times of danga and panga with a salute to the tiranga in a mish-mash song and dance pastiche of reality shows, gloss, high-rise Dubai buildings and such? In craft, such a film may be compelled by box-office necessities or multiplex requirements, but hey, there is nourishment even in popcorn fantasies.

Happy New Year mocks the stereotypes even as it supplies them with a how-to manual that draws liberally from films such as Lagaan or Chak De India: Play on your skills, work as a team, celebrate the magic of life and yes, keep your izzat up. These are not soulless, heartless characters. They just do not have the life skills and have not heard of psychiatrists and even less can afford them. So they need a Bollywood director with a mother-like warmth (with triplets for proof) to tell them the stuff: “You are okay!”

It is difficult not to like Deepika –who manages to ooze grace even in a caricatured role a bit outsized for her elegant shoes.  SRK may be just adding his tadka of Red Chillies to the masala film. What works is the pastiche of cinematic clichés – like Bollywood laughing at itself.

As a cinematic experience, it is spoof as high art with a heart. As formula it is difficult not to imagine the Indiawale song at new-year DJ-blessed bashes. It is difficult not to enjoy crossword-solving moments where old Bollywood scenes, lines and situations are recreated with self-conscious we-are-like-this-only attitude. Ms Khan could well be regarded as a Bollywood impressionist, with more historical significance than she might herself realize. In Om Shanti Om, she played on Karz, the re-incarnation drama. In Happy New Year, she subtly plays on the Deewar formula at some deep level as she crafts King Khan into an angry young man who must dance, joke and conspire in the new century to achieve the same objective that Amitabh Bachchan’s Vijay did in the cult movie of the 1970s.

In that sense, Ms. Khan’s tribute to cinema becomes an extension and a celebration of the Bollywood masala film – with its special undercurrent of social relevance with a soul.  There are characters you can sympathise with, lost in a big bad world where the calculating mind triumphs over the innocent, joyful heart. In turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, HNY does what shows like Kaun Banega Crorepati have been doing on prime-time TV, contributing to a new Indian awakening with a new sense of confidence.  If Shah Rukh Khan’s Charlie shows an extension of Deewar’s Vijay, Deepika’s Mohini is a 21^st Century of Mother India that Nargis played – a moral icon, a striving figure seeking respect and justice.

You can sing and dance in dark times. Stereotypes and archetypes can create a new mythology. So what if they are a spoof? They have hearts that beat and souls that reflect. To laugh is a necessity. To cry is a compulsion. And losers must be made to feel like winners. In a reality show called Bollywood, ticket-buyers are judges.

Yeh Saali Zindagi: Rock n Roll Raagini with Rajma Risotto

Look at Priti. Look at her hard. She could be Jessica Lall. Singing in a band, in a tentative “brother-like” relationship with a dubious Punjabi restaurant owner, insecurely struggling with club life as the daughter of a father who “spent his life reading the papers.”
Look at Arun. Chartered accountant and gangster extraordinaire, in a gangland of affections and bullets, blackmails and deals, being held leech-like by a boss steeped in murky business even as he wants to run away.
“Yeh Saali Zindagi,” Sudhir Mishra’s latest, takes us through characters that seem grey yet colourful, laced with humour and spunk in a world of ironies, where destiny shapes them in a carpet in which each character runs into each other to create intricate wefts and warps.
The roles in delightful inter-mix: a money-laundering frontman industrialist who speaks Haryanvi, kidnap racketeers charmed by urban chic, a home minister in sophisticated veneer seeking an elusive social respect, a tycoon on the verge of bankruptcy with a wayward Casanova son, a possessive lover in jail locked in a peculiar relationship with a policeman brother.
More: a UP gangster with a cross-dressing half-brother in Georgia, an old Delhi girl who seeks dignity in a world of shady fortunes.
As it tackles possessive and protective love in their various shades of material conflicts, YSZ shows you shades of directors who are leaving their mark on a cinema that I classify as post-modern realism.
Mishra’s oeuvre has elements of his own previous films, notably “Is Raat Ki Subah Nahin” – an overnight tale of romance, lust and underworld rhythms; and “Hazaron Khwaishen Aisi” – an Emergency era saga of idealism and mystical, mysterious love.
In bringing these together, the director borrows stylistically from his peers in the emerging school of “chic realism” – so we see a Tarantino-like precision of nature quirks, 30-second commercial style aestheticism of Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra (particularly in Old Delhi scenes), gangland processes that remind you of Ram Gopal Varma and stark, rustic imagery and dialogues that remind you of Vishal Bhardwaj. It must be added, however, that Mishra, even in earlier films like Dharavi, has always had a leaning towards earthy realism.
Mishra celebrates Delhi in all its current shades: Gurgaon offices, rustic hideouts in rural Haryana, the magical Purana Qila, the Lutyens homes of ministers, and half-baked characters who pander to the rich and the powerful.
For those weaned on the call centre and mobile phone driven mall culture of Karan Johar movies, YSZ could be an antidote, revealing the underbelly of the scam surrounding the 2G spectrum that made those calls possible.
But this is no hero-villian tale. Nearly all characters,irrespective of their stature or orientation, are victims of their circumstances or nature, like in a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. All of them, nearly, faced with choices, grapple with love, respect and an elusive emotional security.
Mishra’s success lies in the way he has probably managed to connect with a multiplex audience through a quick-footed plotline while keeping a soul that could well belong in an old classic. In Arun (Irrfan Khan in a blemishless performance), you can see the Pyaasa of Guru Dutt blended like a bartender’s special with Deewar’s Vijay.
In the last scene, where he leans into the lap of Priti (an effective Chitrangada Singh in a muse’s delight role), you almost see the Amitabh Bachchan of Deewar.
But no. Seconds later he sounds like Pyaasa and all of a sudden, you realise that the sad man and the angry young man have blended into a humourous character who celebrates the random ironies of life.
If there was a movie to tell you about John Lennon’s famous line, “Life is what happens when we are busy making other plans” – this could be it.
Arun the protagonist looks for “Rajma Chawal”-like motherly love in a rock-n-roll saga of guitars, gore and glory, interspersed with the rustic raagini-belt of Haryana. The tapestry works because plots, characters and the sheer style prop up each other in a diary-style thriller narrative.

Endhiran: Kyunki Hollywood Bhi Kabhi Kodambakkam Thi

Endhiran: A wonderful effort.
I fell for the first half, but quite sure the money is being made from the second.
Freudian psychology and Darwinian perspective wrapped in post-Asimovian sci-fi narrative with special effects razzmatazz curated specially with Tamil Nadu's feudo-democratic sensibilities.
I am afraid the magic of Vairamthu's lyrics and Sujatha's dialogues must be wholly lost in translation for those who watch it as "Robot" --much like the humanoid without human emotions that is the heart of the movie.
Special mention for a satirical interlude, where Rangusky, a mosquito gangleader, demands National Bird status!
Watch out dear Hollywood, here comes Kodambakkam.

Is Gulzar a plagiarist? Or was he inspired by Jim Morrison?

I have often wondered if Gulzar is a plagiarist. Of course he is not.

Here is what he says in the lyrics of his much celebrated song in Kaminey:

aaja aaja dil nichode
raat ki matki tode
koi good luck nikaale
aaj gullak to phode

English translation:

Come, let us squeeze our hearts
Break the pot of the night
Let us take some good luck out
Let's break the piggybank pot!

Full lyrics here

And then, it invariably reminds me of the celebrated lines of The Doors in Moonlight Drive

Let's swim to the moon, uh huh
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evenin' that the
City sleeps to hide
Let's swim out tonight, love
It's our turn to die
Parked beside the ocean
On our moonlight drive.

Here's the song


Oh, no! Jim Morrison was an inspired rockstar and Gulzar equally magical in a different way. The rest of the two songs meander in different senses. And take their own course.
The spiritually-inclined badboy rockstar who died young and wizened old man of Bollywood may be far apart, but their sensitivities speak the same visual imagination. Someone must ask Gulzar if he ever heard (perhaps inspired by his daughter), "Moonlight Drive."
But surely, "penetrating the evening" and "breaking a pot of (called) the night" have a striking resemblance.
Coincidence? Great men think alike?

Perhaps he was inspired. Only inspired. Only just.

Bizarre Chors, Motherly Whores: Ishqiya and the Underworld Chic

“Surrender,” the gangster moll tells her underworld lover, citing sections of the Indian Penal Code in which he cannot quite be convicted. She longs for the company of her fugitive mate, and the respect she must be planning for her child to be conceived some future day.
He says he plans to. He hopes his benefactors’ political party will come to power in three months. If not, he says, he will “cylinder.”
“Surrender,” she corrects him, “not cylinder.”
The mispronounced surrender becomes a teasing metaphor, turning a symbol of devotion into an explosive instrument, as Ishqiya winds through a tale of love, longing, sex, violence, competition and the eternal mysteries of life in the rugged gangster-land movie set in the rural zones of Uttar Pradesh. Here caste wars and crime meet the Freudian rivalries of men and women fighting over each other.
They are all lovers, or Ishqiya, in this hyper-realistic saga woven around the common attraction of a foster-father and young nephew duo (Naseeruddin Shah and Arshad Warsi) for the abandoned moll whose persona’s layers are as engaging as the thickening plot.
Look at Mushtaq, the caricatured gang leader who torments the duo, listening only to his wife who calls him on the cellphone that plays, “O meri zohra jabeen.”
Look at Iftikhar (Naseer), who plays a quiz mastermind on old Bollywood songs as he cuddles up with Krishnaji, the gangster widow that he tries to woo – and one who makes him peel garlic over musical banter.
Look at Babban (Warsi) who frequents whores but turns on his rugged, boyish charm to seduce the homely woman and anger his competitor-guardian.
Look at Krishnaji (Vidya Balan) who conspires for a crime, plays the tanpura, exchanges sublime musical notes and then gives in to the raw advances of a seductor.
Look at the woman who runs Mona beauty parlour as she plays the small-town mistress in cheap lingerie laced with promises of eternal love.
Look at her secret lover who stutters through industry, worship, prosperity and dubious devotion to mistress.
“So your love is love and my love is sex?” Babban asks his uncle of sorts, turning an unintended spokesman for the new sexuality of the Bollywood woman.
It is okay now for her straddle a troika of men, even as she craves for the social respect, mysteriously exhibited in a cocktail of wriggly filmsong shakes in jeans and shades on the one hand and the humming of a soulful classic as she flips phulkas in a seedha-pallu saree.
Is Krishnaji (played with surprising aplomb by Vidya Balan) for real?
In director Abhishek Chaubey’s saga schooled in producer Vishal Bhardwaj’s mentoring, the mother and the mistress dance in the same persona, surprising and shocking her menfolk as he does us.
This is a new idiom for Bollywood, mixing elements of Shyam Benegal, Quentin Tarantino and the eternal Shakespeare, who inspired Bhardwaj’s Omkara set in the same country.
Omkara, Kaminey and Ishqiya form an unintended triology of underworld chic of the Hindi belt, complementing and contrasting another uintended triology from the Karan Johar school – Kurbaan, New York and My Name Is Khan set in exotic overseas locations.
If the KJo school looks at the international terror that visits skyscrapers, the VB school peeps into the hearts and minds of the people that supply its raw version in the rural hinterland.
Ishqiya comes in the league that is spelling a new wave in alternative cinema--blending social realism with literary depth and yet somehow managing storylines and musical narratives that stay mainstream.
Pictured with a camera that makes a Cartier-Bresson or Raghu Rai photofeature come alive on celluloid, and musical motifs that blend with the mysterious motives of its multiple protagonists, Ishquia has elements of an epic narrative as characters plunge headlong into events that make them lose themselves in a labyrinth of violence, hatred and competitiveness – all in the elusive quest for love and acceptance.
This is not the message of love sent in a Page 3 half-page ad This is the focus on the human heart that is as capable of deceit as it is of sacrifice in its quest for love.
If you watch Ishqiya, the next time you chuckle at a Mayawati statue, you might connect it with a Dalit boy called Nandu, who takes the gun to defend his lot as they fight the Thakurs who dishonour their womenfolk.
If you watch Monica Bedi in a reality show, you might just spend an extra second spotting Krishnaji in her.
If you watch the Breaking News tag chronicling the heinous crime of a previously unheard-of Hindi belt gangster on AajTak, you might just pause and wonder if there is inside the gun-runner a Verma, going home in stealth to eat puffed phulkas burnt in the corners by a woman swathed in love unexplainable in editorial columns
You might just recall a woman called Phoolan Devi, who, long long before she became the Bandit Queen, was a gangster’s moll not far from Chambal river.
As the tale that weaves kidnapping and gangsters reaches its denouement, Ishqiya’s characters are lost, but not their quest for love.
As cylinders blow up in tall fires that burn a barnyard home with its beautiful-brown interiors in the tender village landscape, serene water flows in a canal over which the characters walk across a bamboo bridge.
The bamboo bridge is hard enough to walk over, but comes with an unmistakeable fragility. That bridge must be an Ishqiya torn between devotional surrenders and explosive cylinders.

H1B Visa Dipped in Desi Ghee: MNIK and the KJo Kool Aid

When you are Karan Johar, you have a magic wand.
You wave it, and financiers give you money.
You wave it, and Shah Rukh Khan stars for you.
You wave it, and characters morph away to defy their roots.
A single mother Muslim weaver woman in a Mumbai suburb steeped in poverty has a child who suddenly props up on a scholarship in the US and equally suddenly manages to bring his brother afflicted with autistic Asperger Syndrome to the streets of San Francisco after quick, hurried morbid shots of a little boy learning English from a Parsee and doing enough to send him to America, where a story awaits to be told.
Whose story?
Not that of the victim of riots in Gujarat, Bhiwandi, Thane, Mahim or Bandra which is closer home to the noisy streets where KJo has spent most of his young and well-groomed life.
Not even, really speaking, of the 26/11 victims in downtown Mumbai.
This one is for America, by America and of America.
Oscar wish? Fox money? NRI box office?
Whatever it is, My Name Is Khan is like an H1B visa dipped in desi ghee. Very alluring in an Indian American Pizza Mom and cute kid way, with the worldview of those who live in nice homes, cool offices and clean streets with fancy cars.
Oh, the story is about 9/11 and what it did to the average South Asian Muslim in America, with the universal, award-winning message thrown in.

Didn’t you know what happened after 9/11 in the US? Fairytale capitalism gave way to neighbourhood racism because of terrorism.
And some Indians, who had never seen the homegrown variety, described in boring editorial page articles as communalism, suddenly discovered this whole Hindu-Muslim thingie.
Between the tandoori Western teen flick and the post-modern girlfriend angst, KJo discovered that the topic that bothers neocons in Washington and the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi could be his muse too.
Oh well, history is like the flu. You never know when it hits you.
KJo is burdened not by history, of Islam, India or Pakistan or Palestine. Everybody is a chocolate boy from South Mumbai with a loving mom, or is converted into one.
Love is a nice message, and multiplexes are nice places to sell it. Add a dash of Koran here and there. Like oregano. Pizza Moms love them. Get the formula: Only love, silly. No analysis paralysis.
And so, Rizwan Khan, the hamming, hamstrung protagonist, lives through the experiences of the Wounded South Asian, stuttering and stammering his way through a love affair with a Pizza Mom hairstylist whose baddie husband left her with a son and little else. To the strains of Martin Luther King’s we-shall-overcome-and its Hindi honge-kamyab, the movie stutters through its steps with the uneasy but persuasive discourse that would do the Indo-US nuclear deal proud.
“My Name Is Khan,” the King of Bollywood announces. “And I am not a terrorist.”
Ingredients for this message: Some Koran. Some metropolitan cosmo-liberalism. Some leave-us-alone-we-love-everybody logic.
As the story unfolds, nice kids fall apart. Neighbours become uneasy adversaries.
Of course, we have heard that before. In tales of 1947.
But this one is for a generation for which Partition happened on 9/11 in the tall, aspirational buildings of New York.
There is enough of America in this film to think that terrorism did not even come to KJo’s Bombay, who survived enough riots in his hometown before making a subject out of the same theme in faraway US. Stunning landscapes flow from a delectable camera: San Francisco, New Mexico and then Georgia, where Hurricane Katrina and suffering blacks suddenly find themselves in a South Asian plot.
Like Mira Nair, KJo badly wants a place in Obama’s sun. So you have to become the endearing, enduring South Asian with chocolate syrup political correctness surrounding the Original Identity. This is McSouthAsia.
KJo wields the story-teller’s tool. He counters a stereotype with an archetype.
Rizwan Khan is one: nice kid, bright engineer type, loves mom and everybody, is productive. Oh yes, namaz-reading Muslim. If this is not enough, there is his Asperger Syndrome with Forrest Gump memories for the Hollywood-bred. Makes you laugh. Tugs at your hearstrings. Makes you reach out for hankies when you are done with that sticky caramel popcorn.
And moms. Lots of.
Nevertheless, the freshness of a story set in the American South and the chirpily warmth of a glowing Kajol make it all worth it. A disjointed script is redeemed by the occasionally punchy dialogue and an amusing sort of storyline, if you survive the first half.
Why didn’t anyone hype the music by Shankar Ehsaan Loy? It is actually a great feature, complementing the beautify of the American South and West Coast. You have Bush and Obama in the plot. You have Iraq and Afghanistan and innocents dying. You have a message. If you have come thus far and still don’t get it, this is the one about all religions being good and love conquering all.
This is Bollywood trying to be Hollywood.
This is crossover trying to play the world movie.
This is KJo thinking he is Spielberg.
Like Spielberg, he is making a movie on aliens he loves. Only, they are from the other side of the same planet and feel like they are from a different one.
When KJo was busy making tandoori Westerns, McDonald’s invented the aloo-tikki burger. Like the Mumbai riots, that too, escaped KJo’s Kool Aid.
He was busy peering through the telescope at aliens he identifies with.
If Bunty and Babli at the local multiplex like it, it is because the loop is complete. We are all ETs now.
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