Emily Wax of Washington Post has something to say About SRK

NEW DELHI,India.

Months before I moved here as a correspondent, Indian American friends started cooing about Shah Rukh Khan, the king of Bollywood - King Khan, as he is known by dreamy-eyed Hindi movie fans from New Jersey to New Delhi, from Bangalore to Bedford.

Khan, short and shaggy-haired, is sort of an Indian Tom Cruise. "He's got camel-shaped eyes and he's so sensitive," a friend giggled. Another put it simply. "He's hot."

I had seen my share of five-hour Bollywood song-and-dance epics - part escapist fairy tales, part campy Broadway shows.

In the 1980s, I lived in Queens Village, where my best friend and I would travel by subway from our elementary school to the Hindi movie theater in Jackson Heights.

We were mesmerized by the melodrama: elaborate extravaganzas that unabashedly mixed romance with science fiction and, say, a private detective theme - all of which made Michael Jackson's then-pioneering "Thriller" video seem under-acted.

But I wasn't totally clear on who the big stars of Bollywood really were. I think I once mixed up Khan, known as "SRK" and a young-looking 41, with Amitabh Bachchan, or "AB," who is equally handsome but way past 60. That's like Brad Pitt with Robert Redford.

So the very weekend my husband and I arrived in New Delhi, I started paying attention, reading Page 3 - the gossip and glitterati pages of the Indian newspapers.

I asked some friends to draw me a chart of the heroes and heroines of Bollywood, which produces hundreds of movies each year and sells 3.6 billion tickets, compared with Hollywood's 2.6 billion.

But there are only a handful of Indian superstars, and day-to-day it was Shah Rukh Khan whose name and face kept appearing.

King Khan now has his own unauthorized biography, "King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema." It's a lyrical and fascinating portrait. But it's also a window on an increasingly consumerist India - a shift Khan embodies.

It seemed that the down-to-earth Khan was selling everything from banking to biscuits. His face beamed from rice ads, Tag Heuer watch billboards and Pepsi commercials. On a random flip through India's many, many entertainment channels, he was on about half of them, showcasing products or crooning hit songs from his movies, with a stunning starlet dangling from his arm.

"Khan was the face of a completely new environment of post-liberalization and growing capitalism in India," said Anupama Chopra, the book's author and a longtime film journalist with India Today, a news weekly. "It showed that India could be both materialistic and retain its history and Indian soul at the same time."

The book follows Khan's rise from childhood as a middle-class, secular Muslim boy to a megastar who played the vulnerable outsider and the antihero. He was the face of a younger, more cosmopolitan and, in many ways, more Westernized Bollywood.

"We suddenly saw that a 20-something kid could make a movie and generate massive revenues at the box office," Chopra said. "It wasn't just about AB anymore with his older and more traditional strong-and-silent-type mystique. There were new personalities now, just like India itself."

Khan married a Hindu woman, laughed off rumors that he was gay - saying he was "metrosexual, and try-sexual" (he would try anything). Yet, he was still Indian enough to refuse raunchy sex scenes in his films.

Khan started in television playing roles as a commando and a circus performer before his breakthrough film in 1995: "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge" ("The Brave-Hearted One Will Take the Bride").

The romance is called "DDLJ" in a country that never met an acronym it didn't love. The film was a massive hit because it was the first to show Indians living in England, while including scenes from India.

The film has broken all records and is one of the longest running in the world, celebrating its 600th week showing to still-packed houses in Mumbai this spring.

Chopra's book also does a wonderful job of charting the history of Bollywood as a symbol of the extravagant and dreamy fantasies that showed the ambitions of an economically rising India.

Eventually, I got Khan's agent's number and requested an interview - at least by cell phone.

It hasn't happened yet. The man is apparently swamped with other requests, along with movie deadlines and advertising shoots.

But I'm going to keep trying. Imagine the stories I could tell my Indian-American friends if King Khan called me.

By:Emily Wax Source:WashingtonPost