Homework

This week's Hindi homework was to go and see a Hindi movie. A nice change from trying to memorise the alphabet and struggling with word lists.

As it happened, the latest Bollywood blockbuster opened this week in Hornsby.

The movie was called, 'My Name is Khan' and frankly, it's hard to know what to make of it.

The main character, as well as the story, is very much like Rain Man, Forest Gump and Chauncey Gardiner (Being there) all rolled into one.

Our hero (played by ShahRukh Khan, who turns up in almost every Bollywood movie we see) has a disability. Aspergers Syndrome. Yet, despite this and his many idiosyncracies - "My name is Khhhan...from the epiglotis" - he makes a success of his life in America, even managing to fall in love and get married to an amazingly beautiful hairdresser (Kajol Devgan).

No Bollywood movie is complete without a wedding, and this is where you'd expect the movie to end. However, in this case it was only the beginning.

From this point on our hero, a Muslim, is thrust onto the world stage, haplessly caught up in the events of 9/11, heroically rescuing hurricane victims in Georgia and finally, after a very long quest, fulfils his ambition of meeting the President himself. "My name is Khan", he tells a very un-Obama like President, "and I'm not a terrorist". And so this movie epic finally ends.

F

(Images courtesy My Name is Khan official website/Flickr.com)