Movie “My name is Khan” did it deliver?

This post is about the Bollywood film ‘My Name is Khan’ its message and delivery. The movie provides a rare insight in the cultural politics in India which most movies shy away from.
My name is Khan is another movie that fundamentally different from the traditional movies coming out of Bollywood. Recently filmmakers of Bollywood have turned to riskier fare in order to appeal to an international audience. And the most daring and ambitious so far has to be "My Name Is Khan". The film had generated more controversy than any other Indian movie to date even before its release when its star Shah Rukh Khan, made a harmless comment about Pakistanis and cricket.
"My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist". This is a line that is often repeated in the new film directed by Karan Johar, and it is one that needs to be repeated especially in the United States. The main character, a Indian Muslim with a severe case of Asperser’s syndrome first utters these words at the very beginning of the film, as he is being roughly searched at the San Francisco Airport.
The story takes several twists and turns. Khan is misunderstood, arrested by FBI and released. Meets a radical Muslim preacher and reaches a Black dominated town in Georgia, which he returns to after hearing that the Katrina hurricane as ravaged near the end.
By the end of the 2.5hr film Khan journeyed to a poor village in the Georgia and helped save a Black church after a hurricane, which sets up the obligatory happy ending due to an unwritten law of Bollywood movies making it seemed forced. In the end the current President Obama awards Khan for his heroism and says to him, "Your name is Khan and you are not a terrorist!”. Then everyone in the crowd joins hands to sing.
The film of course crushes the most popular post-9/11 prejudices of our times. The case isn’t new. Which is that while most global terrorists may be Muslims - all Muslims aren’t terrorists. And that no religion, including Islam, preaches violence against the innocent.
My Name is Khan is a film made with sincerity and sweat, ambition and conviction. It grapples with the most urgent and fraught issue facing humanity religion. It features a striking performance by Shah Rukh Khan. What were its best points? Its depiction of life, and the lives of Muslims living in the US, was remarkably accurate. Yet despite all this, My Name is Khan never becomes the empowering, inspiring epic it aspires to be. This is mainly because in some places credibility and reality were stretched to the limit.


By: Danish Ahmed