Famed Bollywood studio sees no song & dance in Afghan war
From Ed Lane

MUMBAI—India’s Yash Raj Films has departed radically from its trademark Bollywood song and dance escapist formula with a politically-laden movie on post-Taliban Afghanistan.
The studio specialises in films that show love conquering over family and social pressures, with habitual song and dance scenes spread over three hours of often outlandish incidents.
But in a first, the studio opted out of its “candyfloss” formula and took a chance on a script called “Kabul Express” by documentary film maker Kabir Khan.
The script aims to put the war on terror in a regional context and tell a serious story about world events in Bollywood lovers’ own backyard. “The basic question is, why is the person on the other side of the border the enemy?” Khan said at a press conference ahead of the Friday’s release.
“Of course, I’ve taken a strong political point-of-view. Afghans, Pakistanis, Indians — in fact all of South Asia — have too much in common for blind hatred to be the only answer and for us the West versus the Taliban is just a backdrop.”
Life in Afghanistan has a powerful appeal in India going back centuries and encompassing Buddhism, epic wars and a large Muslim population, while Bollywood flicks also have a huge fan base in the war-torn country, Khan said. To capture the regional interest, Khan brings together Pakistani actor Salman Shahid, Indians John Abraham and Arshad Warsi, Afghan actor Hanif Hum Ghum and American actress Linda Arsenio, who are forced to trust each other during a kidnap ordeal spread over two days.
The story revolves around two Indian journalists after the US-led invasion in 2001 who aim to interview Taliban leaders. The result is what Yash Raj, India’s most successful and largest film studio, says “marks a departure from their usual Hindi mainstream larger than life extravaganzas.”
For director Khan, who made a documentary called “The Taliban Years and Beyond” shown on the Discovery Channel in 2003 and “The Titanic Sinks” about environmental destruction in Afghanistan, the idea was to put the country in context for an Indian audience used to the “black-and-white” portrayal in the West.
“(US President) George Bush is as much of a terrorist as Osama bin Laden,” he said in an interview. “But we have let the West tell its story unchallenged and without context. So this film is meant to tell a story that pulls in audiences and also in a way that can best be described as Afghanistan for dummies.”
Hanif escaped from prison after bribing Taliban guards using money from selling his house with the help of his family members. “I gave them a Kalashnikov as their bribe after getting money,” Hanif said. He the fled to Iran where he acted in television serials to support himself.