There is only one rational reaction to the photograph that ran on the Saudi Gazette's front page yesterday, an image of a middle-aged woman preparing to hurl a stone towards a multiplex cinema scheduled to screen Bollywood icon Shah Rukh Khan's new film, “My Name is Khan”. And that reaction is: how narrow can a person's mind actually be? “My Name is Khan” stars Khan as a man with Asperger's Syndrome, a kind of autism, who travels across post-9/11 America and encounters anti-Muslim sentiment all along the way. It is one of a handful of Bollywood features receiving international distribution and one of the very few of that group that treat a serious subject. The film received its world premiere at a special event in Abu Dhabi last week and is currently screening in competition at the Berlin Film Festival while opening in theaters across the globe. But it is not the subject of the film that has riled Hindus in India but a remark that Khan made lamenting the absence of any Pakistani players in the Indian Premier League, the world-class cricket organization. Such a remark was enough to inflame Indian extremists whose reaction was enough to persuade some theater owners not to screen the film as scheduled. Additionally, police sent officers to guard theaters as well as mixing plain clothes officers in the crowds to ward off any possibility of violence erupting inside the theaters. The threat of violence comes mainly from the Shiv Sena whose leader has confessed great admiration for Hitler, so it's not as if rational thought were governing the reaction against Khan and the film. As one ticket buyer told a reporter, “You have to stand up to the Shiv Sena or else they will become a Hindu Taliban.” No movie has ever changed the world and no movie star has really done much to change the world. Using a film as the pretense for violence is small-minded and always an out-of
