My Name Is Khan

"My name is Khan and and I am not a terrorist."

A 2010 Indian film starring Those Two Actors, Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol.

Born in India, Rizwan is diagnosed from an early age as having Asperger's Syndrome. His mother patiently takes care of him, teaches him right and wrong and finds a mentor willing to help him. Unfortunately, her attention spurs the jealousy of Rizwan's brother Zakir, who leaves India for the United States at 18, to create his own business. After their mother's death, Zakir helps Rizwan move to America, acquire the nationality and find a job. This is how Rizwan meets and falls in love with Mandira, a Punjabi hairdresser with a young son named Sameer. After a ridiculously cute courtship, Rizwan and Mandira decide to get married - against their families' wishes, since he's Muslim and she's Hindu. Sameer and Rizwan become best friends, Mandira's dream of opening her own hair dressing salon comes true and they're all set to live happily ever after.

Then September 11 happens.

Then It Gets Worse.

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Tropes used in My Name Is Khan include:

• Anvilicious / Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped
• Barack Obama: And how.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Rizwan ends up in the equivalent of Guantanamo Bay because Mandira tells him to tell the president he's not a terrorist.
• Beige Prose: Rizwan's letter to Mandira.
• Beta Couple: Rizwan's brother, Zakir, and his wife.
• Bilingual Bonus: The African-American church that Rizwan ends in is called Church of Rock.
• The Bully: Leads to the death of Sameer
• Closer to Earth: Mandira is this for Rizwan until her son is killed and she understandably flips out.
• Disability Superpower: Khan is extremely intelligent and fares exceptionally well with logic problems, which means he can fix almost anything.
• Idiot Savant: Rizwan.
• Infant Immortality: Yeah, averted.
• Innocent Inaccurate: Rizwan's letters to Mandira, when he is being detained for terrorism. An example would be the point where we see that the temperature in his cell is changed from extreme cold to extreme heat as a form of torture. Rizwan's letter, paraphrased: "This place is strange. Sometimes it's too cold, sometimes it's too hot. Maybe they're having problems with the air conditioning."
• Kids Are Cruel: Especially to Sameer when they find out his (step-)father is Muslim. The kids who murder him are barely older than him.
• Life Imitates Art: The movie starts with Rizwan being searched and detained for questioning in an airport because people mistake him for a terrorist. When he traveled to the US to promote the movie, Shahrukh Khan was... searched and detained for questioning in an airport because his name lit up a red signal for terrorism. Oops.
• Mistaken for Terrorist: Throughout the course of the film.
  • Even when he's screaming he's not a terrorist!
  • And specially when he pointed to actual terrorists.
• Police Are Useless: As is the national defense department.
• The Promise: Mandira tells Rizwan she'll marry him if he can find a place she hasn't seen in San Francisco.
• Sibling Rivalry: Played with: Zakir is jealous of the attention Rizwan gets and that was what compelled his emigration to USA. However, see "Well Done, Son" Guy below.
• Spell My Name with an "S": Khan is pronounced KAH-N with a guttural K.
• Straight Man: Played with as Rizwan takes almost everything so literally that he becomes deadpan.
• Tear Jerker: Do not watch this movie with women who have children or with people who has sufferend any form of discrimination.
• The War on Terror: The film show many of the effects it got not only on Muslims, but also on people who were seen as Muslim-adjacent. Besides the events directly related with Rizwan:
  • A particularly sad sequence in the film is when Haseena, Zakir's wife and a very devout Muslim that wears a very covering style of hijab, is tackled by students that forcibly remove her headscarf. Her husband has to convince the teary woman that for now it's better that she forgoes it despite her perceived loss of modesty, on the vein of "Allah will understand".
  • A tertiary character in the film is a Sikh journalist that is brutally assaulted by ignorant thugs that confused him for an "arab terrorist" because of his turban. Next time he reappears in the plot, he wears no turban and has extremely short hair, and despite being implied that there has been several years after the incident he was still shaken for it.
  • On his travel to tell the president that he's not a terrorist, Rizwan accidentally finds a group of Islamic proto-terrorists, whose leader preaches their need to "take action" as avenging the spurn they have gotten after 9/11. Rizwan quickly calls them out as being as evil as the people, then he attempts to denounces them to the FBI. Albeit he couldn't fully denounces them, his call alerted the authorities who soon arrested the leader and almost everybody involved, except for a member that quickly realized who rat on them and went ton stab rizwan just when he was freed from the Guantanamo-expy detention center
• There Are No Therapists: Played with. While in India Rizwan didn't have actual therapists looking for him or his condition actually addressed, but he got sort of professional help when he was taught by a personal tutor to compensate his inability to stay in the educational system; only when he was in the States he was actually diagnosed with Asperger's and treated accordingly. His sister in law was a psychologist and the one who got his actual diagnosis, and she tries to offer her professional help when the trauma piles in.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Subverted somewhat with Zakir, who leaves for the United States as soon as he turns 18 in part to escape his family, but when their mother dies he sponsors Rizwan to come to the US and live with his family.