Rohit Shetty's Chennai Express is a romantic comedy about a man (played by Shah Rukh Khan) from one part of India, who lands up in another part with an entirely different culture and language, feeling like an alien in his own country.
In India, where there are 1683 different spoken languages and where every 2000-5000 kms, the language, clothes and food change so dramatically, he finds that love is the only universal language. While we all know Shah Rukh is a Pathan, went to school in Delhi, has a cricket team in Kolkata and lives in Mumbai, we discovered his strong South connection over a conversation. We bring you an excerpt from the same, where Shah Rukh talks about how his Pathan father fell in love with his South Indian mother.
"My mother is from Andhra and lived in Karnataka and used to speak all four South languages. My grandfather was the Karnataka state chief engineer of Mangalore Port and was the first Oxford- educated engineer, who was highly respected. He designed and built the Mangalore Port. My grandfather once took his four daughters, eldest of whom was my mother, to Delhi for a visit. In those days, there were pillars at India Gate. They had an ice-cream in their car after which the car hit one of the pillars and overturned. My father was the cousin brother of General Shah Nawaz, who was the second-in-command to Subhash Chandra Bose (Mangal, Dhillon and Shah Nawaz were amongst the three biggest freedom fighters). My father and he were Pathans from Peshawar and would walk at India Gate in the evenings. Seeing the car overturned, they turned the car over and took my mother and her family to the hospital. My grandfather and my mother's three sisters became alright, but my mother lost her memory and needed matching blood. As luck would have it, my father's blood matched hers and he gave his blood to her. My grandmother (nani) surprisingly was pregnant at that time and thus, to not give her stress on the phone, my grandfather requested my father if he would go to Bangalore to give her the news about her family and my mother having lost her memory (a Pathan will often do that as my mom's family had no help in Delhi).
When he returned back from Bangalore, he would go everyday and look after this lady who had lost her memory and fell in love with her. My mom, coincidentally, was engaged at that time to someone else. He came to Bangalore and wanted to marry my mother. They were both Muslims and my grandparents agreed. I was born and brought up in Mangalore till the age of five. There were no men in my maternal side except my grandfather. My mother was the eldest daughter and my mausies had got married late. I, too, had an older sister, so I became the first boy in the family and my mom gave me for five years to be looked after by my grandmother, so I was brought up in Mangalore by my maternal aunts and my nani. In the fifth year, I think, she missed me a lot and took me back with her. So, I was brought up by women and spoke Kannada when I was small with the servants of the house. My maternal house is still in Toli Chowki, Hyderabad. After doing 72 films, life seems to have come a full circle with Chennai Express."
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