When Aamir was American for me

This Saturday I was flying to Pune from Bangalore and I had this Hit maker edition of India Today with me and Aamir was smiling at me, somehow I was transported back to my childhood days or say teenage (for I really graduated in to my teens in my 16Th year) .It was in my 8th standard or probably 9th I don’t remember correctly, Rangeela had released and was dubbed in to my native language Telugu , it was hyped to be the best movie of the year and there was some other movie called Kuch to pagal tha , that was what my friends would tell me the name was , which I later found out was Dil to Pagal Hai and some Sharukh Khan was the hero.

I used to live in a stretch of houses which had cement tiles for roof and was like a ghetto ( now really thinking back about those days where some waste paper and rubber band’s would become cricket balls and a wooden stick would be a bat and we would play in the streets bindaas , makes me crave for it ). For the five families which lived there, only one house hosted a television with DoorDarshan as a sole channel, Chitrahaar was our only source to Hindi filmy world.

With this background set , when Rangeela released in that year in Telugu , having seen some censored wall posters on the way to school , we wanted to see the movie . I went to my Dad and pulled up the courage to ask him to take me to the movie , My dad looked at me as if I had spoken a swear word one and said that I shouldn’t watch such movies and he would not take me. I did not have the courage to prolong the discussion, but every now and then during class breaks I would hear my friends whisper in class about how his father was discussing with his guests about the acting prowess of the hero called American in the movie Rangeela, and the pronunciation added to the whispering made me assume that the name of the hero was American. I used to wonder why is an Indian guy named American and then I reason myself with some other filmy knowledge , Konidella Siva Sankara Vara Prasad was Chiranjeevi ,s o this guy should have named himself fancy as his name must have been as long as the megastar’s .

I used answer the same in quizzes which were conducted in school or outside for fun and get away with the answer for my pronunciation was as bad as theirs and the quizmasters would hear Aamir Khan (which they want to hear).No one ever corrected me and I never bothered to check his name up on the posters, Urmila was good enough for me. Years later, I bunked my classes when I was in my 12th (I think so) and went for this movie Mann with one of my friends, and there I happened to see this name flashed on the screen “Aamir Khan “. I started to laugh and my friend was amused, He did not know why, only I knew how stupid I felt that day.

The thought brought me a good laugh and I burst out laughing loud only to see the confused face of my co-passenger.