Shah Rukh is more than just the hero of My Name Is Khan. He is a hero. Full stop. Oddly enough, there aren't too many of them in our filmdom. In the fictional land we call Bollywood, when it comes to the screen, there are no actors, only heroes. They are so much larger than life, they routinely vanquish whole armies with their bare fists; they need only two and a half hours to decimate the ungodly and clean up the streets of crime. Yet they dare not take their shoes off in public. Because if they did, you could see their feet are made of clay. Over the years, how often have Mumbaikars cringed to see the sickening spectacle of these 'heroes' being brought to their knees by some local bully who has issued a 'decree' against them? It's not just actors we are talking about: producers and directors too belong to the category of men who loom like Gulliver before us Lilliputians, but when it comes to people who threaten and browbeat, they shrink to the proportion of Gulliver before the Brobdingnagians.
To some extent you can understand why they so readily leave behind their swagger and go cap in hand to ask for forgiveness from extra-constitutional authorities: films are a collective enterprise and expensive to produce. To take a tough stand may then seem like a needless heroic gesture, likely to bring financial ruin to many of those involved in the project. This becomes even more so when the government in power is unable to control the goons who want to stop the screening of a film. But the capitulation of our 'heroes' perpetuates the power of the various Senas that now patrol the land. In the event, it would have been so easy for Shah Rukh Khan to have succumbed to the temptation and given the apology the Shiv Sena wanted. He was particularly vulnerable on two counts. First, My Name Is Khan is a big film so a lot of money is involved. Second, and even more important, Shah Rukh's name is Khan, and the Sena hostility for the Muslim community is well known and has a long and violent history behind it. People say Shah Rukh Khan acts too much; others say he often talks too much. But when it mattered, he did the brave thing and firmly kept his mouth shut. For that this Khan is a real-life hero.
Source: Timesoindia
To some extent you can understand why they so readily leave behind their swagger and go cap in hand to ask for forgiveness from extra-constitutional authorities: films are a collective enterprise and expensive to produce. To take a tough stand may then seem like a needless heroic gesture, likely to bring financial ruin to many of those involved in the project. This becomes even more so when the government in power is unable to control the goons who want to stop the screening of a film. But the capitulation of our 'heroes' perpetuates the power of the various Senas that now patrol the land. In the event, it would have been so easy for Shah Rukh Khan to have succumbed to the temptation and given the apology the Shiv Sena wanted. He was particularly vulnerable on two counts. First, My Name Is Khan is a big film so a lot of money is involved. Second, and even more important, Shah Rukh's name is Khan, and the Sena hostility for the Muslim community is well known and has a long and violent history behind it. People say Shah Rukh Khan acts too much; others say he often talks too much. But when it mattered, he did the brave thing and firmly kept his mouth shut. For that this Khan is a real-life hero.
Source: Timesoindia
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