The film refuses to let the characters be saints. Mandira is prejudiced against the very community she married into. Rizwan is stubborn to the point of self-destruction. They are flawed, which makes their eventual reunion earned rather than saccharine. The second half of the movie is a picaresque journey across red-state America. Rizwan wanders through Georgia, Alabama, and Texas. He gets arrested. He saves a town during a hurricane. He prays in a mosque that is about to be attacked by an angry mob.
That is precisely why, over a decade after its release, Karan Johar’s My Name Is Khan feels less like a Bollywood melodrama and more like a prophecy. my name is khan
For those who haven’t seen it, the plot is deceptively simple: Rizwan Khan (played with heartbreaking sincerity by Shah Rukh Khan), a Muslim man with Asperger’s Syndrome, moves to San Francisco after falling in love with a Hindu single mother, Mandira (Kajol). Then 9/11 happens. Overnight, the America that embraced them turns xenophobic. Tragedy strikes their family, and Rizwan embarks on a quixotic journey across the United States to tell the President a single sentence: “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist.” The film refuses to let the characters be saints
