After Slumdog Millionaire, the West wants more of the Mumbai slums. Last week Karan Johar shot some key slum sequences in Borivali with the Slumdog Millionaire kid Tanay Chedda who plays SRK's childhood role in My Name Is Khan, and the incredibly underused Zarina Wahab who plays SRK's mother.Karan chose the boy to play the childhood part of Shah Rukh's life not only because of his facial likeness to Shah Rukh, but also because of Tanay's instant connectivity with the Mumbai slums and thereafter the Western audience.
Says Karan, "Tanay is exceptionally talented. He was able to imbibe Shah Rukh's character traits and use them to make SRK's childhood look convincing."
The director now intends to cast Tanay as junior SRK whenever required, much in the way that Master Mayur played the young Amitabh Bachchan in a series of films.
Karan's exposition on the Muslim identity is expected to reach out to a global non-NRI audience. Though the take-off point for My Name Is Khan is 9/11, not a single shot is taken in New York.
The film is set in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Two of the most expensive cities in the US for shooting. While Karan Johar's production of Rensil D'Silva's Kareena-Saif film on terrorism will have Philadelphia masquerading as New York, Johar's own directorial take on terrorism and the isolation of the working-class Muslim has gone to the two actual US cities were the plot is location.
Karan shot in LA earlier this year. He leaves for San Francisco in May for a 40-day schedule. The first and last Hindi film to be shot in San Francisco was Imtiaz Ali's Love Aaj Kal.
Putting his shoulder surgery behind him, Shah Rukh with best friend Karan Johar and favourite co-star Kajol to accompany him would be gone to San Francisco for 40 days in May and June.
With Aamir Khan vacationing with his children out of the country and SRK busy with IPL, the two purported architects and the mediator Karan Johar for the solution for the multiplex crisis are all out of the loop, putting a large question mark before the deadlock that threatens to shut the film industry.