King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema

Although he's not a household name in America, Shah Rukh Khan, sometimes called the “Tom Cruise of Hindi film,” is a world-famous superstar, the kind who generates “Elvis-level hysteria” wherever he goes. Born in New Delhi in 1965, Shah Rukh grew up loving movies, with American John Travolta and Bill Cosby among the stars he admired. After graduating from high school, he moved from theater to television to movie acting, gradually finding his niche with “brooding antihero” roles, the sort that other actors rejected for fear of spoiling their leading-man image. As Shah Rukh has became a bigger star, playing a variety of roles, he also helped the industry expand. His films range from traditional themes (Asoka ) to remakes of classics (Devdas ), song-and-dance romances and even Mission Impossible –type films like Don . Chopra, a Mumbai-based freelance journalist who comes from a filmmaking family herself, offers readers both the life story of Shah Rukh and a condensed history of the Indian film industry. Even if you know nothing about Indian cinema, her prose style (“Bollywood now recoiled from the mafia like a man shrinking from a sore-covered leper on the street”) makes this a bizarrely fun read. (Aug.)