My name is not Khan and I’m not your audience

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Recently in New York city, I sat behind a motley group of New Yorkers as they settled in to watch Karan Johar’s “My Name is Khan”, an epic film that’s been declared a global hit with a message of peace that as some press nugget said “has spread across the world”.

Maybe they were confusing it with volcanic ash, as this message clearly got lost in travelling from Washington D.C., where the film’s lead (Mr. Khan, played by, yes, in a clever twist of words, Shah Rukh Khan, who, that’s correct, is also named Khan), shakes hands with President Barack Obama (the actor playing him looked like Anupam Kher) to New York’s Times Square where ten days ago, a young Pakistani man tried to blow up an SUV. His name was Shahzad and he was a terrorist.

In this geopolitical mess, a film that supposedly deals with it head on, opened in the U.S. across many art house theatres now, some months after the money machine that it became in India (revealing clearly that at the core of it a lightly handicapped megastar walking across Colorado and Alabama to get to DC is what Indian audiences identify with).

It has arrived here, shorter by 45 minutes, edited by the team that did the romantic comedy “500 Days Of Summer” (no, they didn’t change the title to “132 Minutes of Khan”). One Chicago newspaper described it as ‘”Monsoon Wedding” meets “Hurt Locker’”.

The day I saw it, the motley crowd in front of me had a professorial looking Jewish man, with the unkempt look that only the extremely wealthy business owner can afford, one African-American corporate sort (blackberry being the clue) and his African-American actress girlfriend (the iPhone and red shoes being the clue) and a frail Japanese lady who brought some sort of milk drink and that deceptive shyness hiding perhaps a world famous fashion designer or cellist, or both.

This was not a special screening for a multicultural melting pot, this was the average audience of downtown Manhattan, a cluster of globetrotting over-achievers, with backgrounds from Manila to Memphis.

This was also, arguably, the exact demographic the new Bollywood wants to go after.

When Karan Johar went one-up on Yash Raj studios relocating our Bollywood romance from Swiss valleys to Manhattan in the mid 90s, first the immigrant cab drivers and shopkeepers were mesmerised, then together with Shah Rukh Khan, they entered the middle-class homes of professional NRIs, New Jersey doctors, London barristers, and took the second generation from being ashamed of Bollywood to making nightclubs have Bollywood nights worldwide.

The final blow for NRIs came when they saw their white friends dancing to “You are my Sonia” better than them from some lesson at a Delhi winter wedding. The conquest was complete.

So now that the global Indian is done and the Indian Indian was always in the pocket, Mr Johar and Mr Khan and all the studios began eyeing the next big market — the non-Indian world cinema lover.

The sort that reads Suketu Mehta, shows up at the Jaipur literary festival, is comfortable in a western winter with a scarf bought in Goa and enjoys fusion Indian dinners every other week.

A perfect sample of which sat before me.

These were people fluent in their Almodovar, Woody Allen, Wong Kar Wai, Jacques Audiard and could debate the finer nuances of “Amelie” or new German cinema. So they assumed what they were about to watch was somewhere between “Bend it like Beckham” and “Persepolis”.

First, they were given a trailer for “Kites”, the next Bollywood offering to the world. “Who is that guy? He looks like Sinbad”, asked the Jewish man of another megastar Hrithik Roshan as he bounced around deserts in New Mexico.

Once MNIK (as Bollywood loves abbreviations, this one’s pronounced Manik) began, a few things happened, when Mr Khan said he would walk to tell the President that he was not a terrorist, a moment clearly intended to be poignant, the Jewish man started laughing.

At a scene where a large number of students are cheering for President Bush at a California campus, the Asian woman said, “I’m from California and no one has ever cheered for Bush”.

Finally, when an African-American gospel choir started singing “We shall overcome” in homeless robes after Khan saved them from Hurricane Katrina, the African American couple walked out.

Clearly, it seems that we have a longer journey to make than Mr Khan’s to get this global audience. Maybe instead of MNIK’s catch phrase what they needed was someone to say ‘My Name Is Story And I Will Make Sense’.