My attempt at a movie review- My Name Is Khan

I just went and saw My Name Is Khan, Karan Johar's latest film starring none other than THE Khan, Shah Rukh.

Ironically, I think the entire hype that the Shiv Sena created by rallying against Shah Rukh Khan and threatening to boycott the film was the biggest boon to the producers, and a higher ticket-seller than any publicity stunts they could have possibly attempted.

Rizwan Khan is a muslim from a small town in India, who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome (a variation of autism). He has a caring mother and a perfectly normal younger brother who is jealous of all the attention Rizwan gets. He goes to the US for higher studies, and as soon as their mother passes away, Rizwan joins him there, in San Fransisco.

It is here that he meets, falls in love with, and marries Mandira, a single mother of a young boy Sameer. The problem is that Mandira is a Hindu (I know, cliches galore... but in this modern day and age, the movie plays down the opposition to their match).

Then, in the midst of all this drama, 9/11 happens! Being a muslim in the USA isn't safe anymore, blah blah blah. A bunch of American kids beat up Sameer and he dies. Mandira is heartbroken, and blames it all on the surname she got when she married Rizwan KHAN. She asks Rizwan to leave, and in her fit of anger and grief, tells him not to come back till he says the words "My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist." to none other than the president of the United States. Khan sets out on a journey across the country, following president Bush to all his various appointments, trying to get a glimpse of the man so he can say the magic words and go back to his wife. Along the way, he meets several interesting people, among them an African American mother-son duo, who he later (somehow in the middle of the whole movie) goes back to save from a hurricane in the small town of Wilhemina, Georgia.

Again, in the midst of ALL this, the presidency changes hands, and Khan finally meets president Obama and says the golden words, "My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist"

Oh, did I mention he gets the wife back in between? There's just so many "major turning points" in the movie, enough to make one dizzy!

That, in a slightly huge nutshell, is the story of the movie My Name Is Khan.

I'm not trying to belittle anyone or put anyone down, and the acting performances were actually quite good. Also, the film has a nice message, albeit one which seems to flit in and out of the movie from within the many layers of themes it is buried under.

I may even go so far as to say the autism angle might have been used to make the movie seem a little less unrealistic, as it is quite hard to imagine someone with all their mental faculties intact doing the things that Shah Rukh's character does in the movie.

If you do watch the movie or have already seen it, I think you'll understand what I mean.

The movie was...... interesting, to say the least. It showed me that there is a very fine line between a great movie and a terrible movie, as it seemed to continuously jump back and forth across this line, as if with a skipping rope. There were a lot of relevant human themes, too many of them actually, and the fact that the director took this mish-mash of emotional, controversial topics ALL TOGETHER and still managed to produce quite a moving film is rather commendable, in my opinion.

Playing along with the tag-line of the movie, I would like to end by saying:

My name is Iyengar, and I do not do Yoga.

Don't bury your FACE in that BOOK

Okay, now I'm going to attempt to tackle an FAQ by all people over the age of forty (Especially parents of teenagers, or rather, especially INDIAN parents of urbanized Indian teenagers)

And that question would be,

"What do you kids do for so much time on facebook?"

Well, at first my answer was the same as most other people my age: "You won't understand, Mom, you're old."

But then, I decided to implement the term I keep hearing thrown around in my Sociology class, and tried to "take an objective view" of the whole thing.

So why IS our generation so hopelessly addicted to social networking sites in general (and facebook in particular)?

Well, what was originally started as a way for people to keep in touch has now become so much more than that. Because the only people I "keep in touch" with are the people I see everyday! So that kind of defeats the whole purpose, doesn't it?

Here's what I usually do as soon as I log onto my facebook page:

1. Check all my notifications (for the uninitiated, this means I check who's commented on my pictures, posted on my wall, sent me a sheep, etc. etc. etc.)
2. Look at my home page, where the Live Feed shows me everything thats going on in everyones virtual lives (notice I used the word virtual, but the lines between that and reality are slowly getting blurred)
3. Facebook-stalk my friends (which involves going to their profile, seeing EVERYTHING they have been doing and EVERYONE they have been interacting with, commenting on anything I find interesting etc.etc.)
4. The facebook-stalking leads me to other peoples pictures, posts etc., some of whom I don't even know.
5. Chat with people who are online (Again, these "people" are usually the ones I met ten minutes ago, and hang out with on an hourly basis)
6. Then, when I'm out of pages to mindlessly stare at or sarcastic comments for my friends' posts and have said "LOL" without meaning it a million times in the chat windows, I turn to the applications.
7. These include checking my fantasy football league, playing poker and trying my hand at miniature video games.
8. Some people are involved in weird stuff like building farms, creating a virtual mafia empire, and making their own aquarium, but I consider myself too cool for such frivolous pursuits (I know, what a hypocrite, right?).
9. There are also numerous pages on all topics under the sun which one can "become a fan" of, right from 'sleeping late' to 'waking up late' to 'sleeping all day' to 'not sleeping at all' to 'pissing the teachers off' to 'pissing the principal off' to every single hang-out-worthy place in the city/country/world to shoes to bags to puppies to kittens to....... well, you get my drift. Again, I consider myself too cool to become a fan of these innumerable pages, though I will admit to having crossed over to the dark side in the past.

I even have relatives constantly facebook-stalking me, and teasing me about any and every girl who is in any pictures with me, or comments on any of my posts. Its quite irritating sometimes, but I've accepted it, because hey, that's what you get for putting your entire life out there for the world to browse through. And to those relatives (who are probably reading this blog right now) I say don't take it personally, I'm just trying to prove a point :P

There's just so much to DO! You can never get bored when you're on facebook! (though that's started to happen to a lot of us as well, you'd be surprised)

And I believe the reason for this is that our generation has a CONSTANT need for stimulation. What's more, the stimulus needs to be ever-changing, because the immense amount of technology we interact with has programmed us ALL to have miniscule attention spans. (I think the whole world is going to have Attention Deficit Disorder soon. Seriously.)

We have grown up multitasking, and have the innate ability to have twenty things on our minds at once, something which earlier generations didn't and find hard to fathom.

This, my friends, is exactly the purpose that I think facebook serves. There's so many different things to do, and so many ways to do them, that we don't need anything else.

And it's actually kind of sad and a little bit scary, because we are slowly and steadily shifting our entire life to the virtual world, and I'm worried that the situation may deteriorate to an extent where we cannot cope with reality.

But the fact remains that this IS our reality now, or at least something pretty close to it.

So now I'm going to go back to my facebook home page, which has been open in another window all this time, and stalk somebody.....

Until the next post! :)

Rishi