Snigger away, all you English speaking, pseudo intellect, international cinema aficionados. I like, or maybe even unabashedly love, SRK. But my reasons go beyond dimples, Switzerland and the way he said K-K-K-Kiran.
Snigger away, all you English speaking, pseudo intellect, international cinema aficionados. I like, or maybe even unabashedly love, SRK. But my reasons go beyond dimples, Switzerland and the way he said K-K-K-Kiran.
I was a kid who grew up several hundred kilometres away from the Indian subcontinent in the sandy emirate of Abu Dhabi. You might have been born there, gone to school there, had a job there, but you never forgot that you were Indian. Your family dinners were filled with dishes of butter chicken and palak paneer, you gave the cab driver instructions in Hindi or Urdu and every Thursday night at 10 pm, the local channel would air a Bollywood movie that would, more often than not, be one starring Shah Rukh Khan.
To say that I enjoyed Thursday nights at home is putting it lightly. It was the one day my parents would let us stay up late, eat junk food and since English movies with 'kissing scenes' were according to mum, 'the timepass of the devil', SRK and the others it was. India, in those movies, was a supremely fun place to be, unlike the bu00eate noire of slumdogs it's often perceived as in these times.
Much has changed since I moved to India. Abu Dhabi, once a lesser known cousin of Dubai, just finished hosting a Grand Prix over the weekend. My parents resignedly, no longer admonish me for watching those dastardly English movies with scenes that go far beyond kissing. Junk food is now consumed more than once a week, sometimes even more than once in a day. The SRK movies, however, still make me feel excited about the haveli amidst the mustard fields as if it were a private room at the seven-star Burj Al Arab in Dubai.
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Am I too less of a realist to be writing for this space? Perhaps. But optimism is what drives us even if that optimism is the product of celluloid. The happy movies with the happy endings are not the options of escapists but of romantics with the hope of a better place to live in, where reel imitates real.
And so if I'm flipping channels and I choose this once to watch the fluff over the gore, don't judge me. I'm not only a sucker for SRK, I'm also a sucker for my very own happy ending.
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