My name is Arindam and I am not ....

I love Karan Johar movies. Not just because he is a great director but I kind of grew up (or grew old) with his movies. When Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was released I could relate it to my then romantic condition. I identified with Sharukh Khan in that movie and I laughed with him and cried (because the pain of being estranged from my wife was hurting me like crazy cause she was sitting 3 seats behind and also because the guy next to me was stinking of alcohol and coconut oil). Then came K3G where I saw AB in me (okay okay myself in AB ji). We had just adopted our son and the other one was on its way. Also at 18 months, my son’s best friend was our nanny Angelica’s daughter Karen. And .. I was almost as rich as AB (The fact that internet stocks have crashed and my concepts on fractions and percentages were so clear that I could have topped any IIT exam is just a small factual error that can be ignored). That was one movie where I generated enough teardrops to cause a mini flood. Then came Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. At that point the ball game of my life had changed and I was trying to figure out whether I was reaching mid-life or it was just another crisis. I could identify with all the four main characters of the movie. I was Priety Zinta because no one appreciated the fact that at the end of the month I would bring in Rs. 18,245.45 which would put food on the table and also with Shahrukh Khan because I was angry from moving from the US to a country called India. I was Rani Mukherjee because I was having a major identity crisis and also Abhishek Bachchan for being sex deprived. I spent A few months after seeing the movie sitting on benches in a park close to a wedding location hoping that soon the bride would run away from the wedding and sit next to me. That did not happen !!!...but I almost got hit by a rickshaw like SRK and got mugged and received a proposition from a female professional who said for Rs 10 she could do wonders.

So… I wanted to see My Name is Khan. Not just because it was another Karan Johar movie and I wanted to see where I fit in it but also because of the hype it had created. Finally IIM marketing graduates have realized that they can make ten times the money by coming up with real life marketing gimmicks for Bollywood as opposed to selling soaps and ketchup door to door. I went with a whole bunch of like minded people to the nearest multiplex to plop a day’s salary for an evening of entertainment and thus reinforce the ego which says, “We don’t do regular movie halls!!”

It took me a while to realize that I was not watching the Hindi version of RainMan. It took Karan three years to research for a movie and he did not find out the difference between Asperger syndrome and Autism? Most probably his original idea was to make SRK an autistic than an Asperger patient but some high flying lawyer must have told him that the movie would be too close to RainMan. Plus, Autism is too easy to pronounce while Asperger can sure compete with Progeria. And what about the 6:05 stance of Sharukh Khan (If you have no clue of what I am saying, stare at the clock hands when the time is 6:05) .Did SRK finally get trained by Dev Anand or what? What a difference from the SRK of Chak De India. Instead of running all over USA like Forest Gump he should have mailed a MPEG file of his Chak De India speech to the president. President Bush would have come crawling to him. Not because of the fact that he wants to play hockey with cute Indian women but to use the same speech to cheer up the US Army before attacking Australia. ( According to him Australia is one of the leading terrorist states in the world because during his last visit someone asked him,”President Bush, You have come here TO-DIE?”)

The marketing genius might have done a good job with the hype but the MBA who was in charge of product management failed miserably. The timing of this movie was two years too late. I agree that the formula was different. Boy Meets Girl, Bomb Blast Happens, Boy Loses Girl, Terrorist is Traced, Boy Finds Girl is a very good variation from the standard formula. However New York and Kurban capitalized on it. Unless you are a Microsoft, it is pretty difficult to be successful by reissuing the same formula.

But… I have never been through a Karan Johar movie without saline secretions from optical glands, as Chatur would put it. That moment came when they started singing “We shall overcome or Hum Hoyengey Kamiyab”. This was the only time the main message of the movie was clear … that there are only two types of People in the world Good People and Bad People ( A classification the Bengalis already knew but to them its Bengalis and Non Bengalis), irrespective of race, color, religion, etc. Sometimes we easily understand complex stuff like supporting the Pakistani cricketer makes us traitors or that our country needs to be divided into two thousand states based on the permutation combination of dialects, religion and caste. A simple concept like that only makes sense to autistic persons, I guess.

I again cried when the poor replica of Obama showed up. It brought back memories of Jan 2009, the inauguration ceremony. I cried that day along with at least 100 million other people. Not because it was a major statistical moment but it marked the beginning of an era of hope. During the last eight years the blue chip brand equity of the United States of America has become like a penny stock. What we do in India pales in comparison with what George did. India has the cop who takes 50p from the truck driver, the politicians who can steal thousands from the state coffer, but we have yet to have a prime minister who got elected by making a farce of the electoral system - by altering the result of a whole state because the chief minister of that state is his brother!!

Through President Obama we can dream again.

I came back home, kind of sad. Not because that I wasted my money on a much hyped movie but because my magical connection with Karan Johar’s movie was gone. Couple of days later when I entered my house I saw something. Lying on my table was a rejection letter from a leading newspaper. A friend of mine suggested that I write the movie review and send it to this newspaper. I smiled and said to myself, “My name is Arindam and I am not on Karan Johar’s payroll”