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Bright colors. Cheery tunes. Epic, convoluted, improbable love stories. Insanely beautiful men and women dancing and lip-synching in musical fantasy sequences that have no connection to the story. Many Westerners, if they have any conception at all of the Mumbai-based Indian film industry known as "Bollywood," have a definite image of the films that come out of Asia's biggest cinema factory.

But it's not just Westerners. "Bollywood is nothing but a man and a woman dancing around a tree and singing!" a South Asian student at my college said disgustedly when I admitted I was becoming a fan. He had a point, though it wasn't just trees. In some of the bigger-budget musicals you'd see them dancing around the Great Pyramids or something. But neither of us knew what Bollywood had to offer outside of its best-known fare.

With today's DVD release of My Name Is Khan, one of Bollywood's most successful films, we take a look at some of India's best movies, and what we can take away from watching them.

On the DVD extras, director Karan Johar says he wants My Name Is Khan to widen the common view of cinematic India as a "singing, dancing nation." He's made a good run at it, too: Khan earned $40 million worldwide ($4 million U.S.) in its theatrical run earlier this year, making it one of the top 10 grossing Bollywood films of all time. Filmed and set mostly in the United States, Khan's colors are muted. No crowds break out dancing. And the title character, though played by Bollywood's top leading man, is not a standard romantic hero.

The film opens in 2007, with a Muslim man named Rizvan Khan (Shah Rukh Khan) who lives in the U.S. and whose family is experiencing post-9/11 prejudice. Khan begins researching President Bush's itinerary, tracking his every move. He tries to board an airplane and gets stopped for behaving strangely—but it's not what you think. It's not what airport security is thinking either. Khan just wants to look the President in the eye and repeat the film's catchphrase: "My name is Khan. And I am not a terrorist."

Rizvan grew up in Mumbai knowing he was different from everyone, but never knowing why. He could repair almost anything, but had a hard time with basic social interaction. After he immigrates to San Francisco, his sister-in-law, a psychology professor (Sonya Jehan), diagnoses him with Asperger syndrome. Rizvan gets a job selling beauty products to salons, which is how he meets Mandira (Kajol), a hairstylist.

Khan and Kajol are among India's most popular movie stars

Romances starring Khan and Kajol are almost a film industry unto themselves. Lighting up box offices globally, their sunny charm and playful chemistry defy traditional romantic barriers like class, religion, and family disapproval. In Khan, they also transcend neurology. She's a divorced single mother; he's an awkward salesman who can't say "I love you" out loud. Fortunately, the actor Khan understands that his job is not to portray a syndrome but a person with a syndrome, and we believe him as he finds other ways to say it.

But there's another problem: she's a Hindu and he's a Muslim. The 9/11 attacks have turned Muslim into a dirty word for many Americans. Mandira and son Sameer (Yuvaan Makaar) aren't Muslims, but she's married to one, and they have brown skin. When a shattering tragedy touches their family, Mandira blames Rizvan. In their town of 30,000 people, she tells him tearfully, "They all hate you!" Sending him away, she sarcastically suggests he find the president of the United States and tell him he is not a terrorist. As "Aspies" are prone to do, he takes her literally, and begins the quest which makes up the film's central story.

It's both hard and easy to find fault with the America we see in My Name Is Khan. The film doesn't always hit the right cultural notes, like when some suburban American boys harassing Mandira's son use very Brit-esque words like "bloody." A lot of the anti-Muslim incidents come straight from post-9/11 headlines, but seeing them gathered into one picture is jarring. Is that really how the past ten years looked to Muslims and the wider world?

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