"Mera beta doctor banega" Hari Prasad Sharma (Munnabhai's father)
I worked my butt off for 5 years to get my doctorate. I drove off into the sunset when I was done and could not attend the convocation ceremony because I was too lazy to drive twelve hours just to recieve my diploma in proper photo-op fashion. My parents missed out on watching me don the black robes and that now gives them something in common with Shah Rukh Khan's children who missed witnessing their father's convocation ceremony.
The University of Bedfordshire conferred an honorary degree upon the King Khan making him Dr.Khan. The reactions among desi public, I notice, range from "Hurray!" to "What the fuck!". In India, we do not have a tradition of meriting talent or achievement with anything at the academic level, leave alone with honorary doctorates. So people are finding it hard to digest that a person who has pranced around trees, done the jhatka-matkas of Bollywood and fueled the escapist cinema that makes some of us cringe in embarrassment, has now been honored with a title that we commonly associate with academic achievement (or at the very least with a pair of thick nerdy glasses). How can Shah Rukh Khan be Dr.Khan?
I am no Shah Rukh Khan fan. I do not watch his every film with star lit eyes nor do I swoon when he appears on screen. I have in the past enjoyed some of his noteworthy performances. I thoroughly enjoyed Chake De and Swades. As a teen, I watched Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge twice in the balcony section of the theatre and then again in the god forsaken stall ranks where bed bugs sapped me of blood for three straight hours. At an age when one still had favorite SRK films, mine was Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. Here in America, I turned traitor and fell in love with foreign films, art and indie films, short films with stories, gradually drifting away from the bright pink, dreamy arms of commercial Hindi cinema. I still managed to catch glimpses of the Khan in Devdas and Om Shanti Om when we graduate students worn with the sternness of realism craved a Bollywood masala fix. Occassionally, when I watched him speak in interviews and during award ceremonies, he struck me as an intelligent, eloquent, quite humorous and mostly unpretentious person.
But over the years, I have rolled my eyes at him, scoffed at his corny lines and been embarassed when I watched him bust a move not befitting a 40 year old. That being said there is no denying that SRK is now the brand amabassador for our Hindi film industry. In Europe, they may not know our prime miniter but they do know who Shah Rukh Khan is. The completion of a doctoral dissertation is usually marked by a significant body of work, a compilation of orginal contributions made to the relevant field by the candidate. In reviewing Dr.Khan's thesis in the arts and culture field, one realizes that he was probably the first commercial Hindi film hero to risk donning the garb of a villain. He was the murderer, the obsessive lover, the stuttering psychopath who changed how we as the audience viewed Bollywood characters. He brought in gray shades to the hero's character in a genre of popular cinema that until then had only safe, predictable black and whites. He was not your typical macho Hindi film hero or devastatingly handsome when he first arrived on the scene. He wasn't even the chocolate hero with a sweet. likeable face. His dancing skills were adequate at best. And yet he became the sensation, doing everything people say one should not do on their way to filmi success. He went against the tide, starting with television, which among acting circles is known to dent chances of a future in cinema. He acted in not one, but two hit television series. At the peak of his career in cinema, he made his return to television hosting the popular Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Wants To Be A Millionaire) show.
At the Golden Globes recently, watching him up on stage, humble and restrained, made me smile. I felt like I knew him. Among the smooth Geres, Pitts and Nicholsons of Hollywood, his mocha skin, his endearing accent, his shy manner and crooked eyebrows were such a welcome sight for me, an Indian in America. In spite of not being a devout SRK fan, I hung onto his every word.
The point of my article originally was not to list all of the Khan's accomplishments but to emphasize that in spite of his very obvious and signficant contribution to the arts, to the popular genre of Hindi films, some of us have an issue with his receiving the honorary doctoral degree. And this I find quite interesting. India has an exam based meritocracy; therefore a degree, a credential has to be accompanied by some kind of a measurable score. A box office score, mind you, may not be acceptable because in India education and films don't mix. If one was an aspiring artist, the middle class in Bombay immediately proclaimed him/ her a dud at school. If you scored well in your SSC exams, you took up sciences, commerce being the next best choice. In my time, doleful parents of students who scored low SSC scores, sighed, shrugged and resigned their children's future's to the unreliable, fickle paths of the arts.
"Yes beta I know you are a theatre artist but what do you do for a living" an old uncle would sometimes ask a young struggling actor, "Art will not be feeding you!" the greying man would exclaim bundling up his fingers and thrusting them towards his mouth, a common gesture for "roti". He would walk away shaking his head satisfied at having trampled the young man's aspirations under the bitterness of his own ignored dreams.
"You are not some Bachchan or Kapoor to have Subhash Ghai and Yash Chopra welcome you with garlands" Karnik aunty would tell a young, break-dancing Rahul when he announced that his performances at the Ganesh Chaturthi festival were in preparation for the 70mm screen.
"Have you seen your face in the mirror? You? You want to be a hero!Ha!" now this one we have all heard someone saying unaware of the cruelty of their words.
To all these questions, Shah Rukh Khan has now become the national answer. He wasn't a Bachchan or a Kapoor. In an industry plagued with nepotism, he arrived as a nobody, with no godfathers or mummy-daddies to usher him in. He had no charming good looks to wow the teenage crowds. I am certain that the commercially viable genre of films in which he stars have critics and reviewers frothing at the mouth. I'm also equally sure there are people who would look through my thesis and find critique-worthy sections or flaws in my discussion. There may be some who disagree with my philosphy or the subject I chose for my resarch. What matters in the end is that a committee at an established institute decided it was worth a PhD. So while Bombay University or the many IITs might not confer benevolence upon an artist of any kind, much less an actor, the University Of Bedfordshire has decided to honor a man who represents in current times the largest film industry in the world.
