As I fumbled with the teapot this morning, sleepy-eyed, I happened to catch an interview on NPR with Shahrukh Kahn, one of Bollywood – the Indian film world’s – biggest stars. While likely to draw a blank expression here in the States, Kahn is an icon to over a billion people in India, the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere – with more followers, probably, than the likes of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. And, as a cultural spokesman for more than 1/6th of the world’s population, he’s got some insights about that part of the world worth listening to.

Bollywood films, with their long running times, penchant for flamboyant color, music and dance, are generally regarded as over-the-top kitsch here in the US. But according to Kahn, whose newest film is set to release in the US as well, Bollywood themes are much more realistic than what’s commonly churned out in Hollywood:

“I say this to everyone: Our fantasies are about earning a good living, having maybe a car — not two. Getting an education for your kids. Our fantasies are not about getting to be president of the country, to sit in a rocket and go and break a meteor. Our fantasies are very real…As a matter of fact, I find the Western cinema very fantastic. You’ve got aliens. And you’ve got things we don’t know about. Blue creatures. You have Batman, you have Superman. I remember the first time I was here — someone was interviewing me in a hotel, and they said, ‘Your films are such fantasies.’ And I’m like, We are fantasies? Our guys just want to sing and dance on the roads. Our guys just want to drive a big car. Our guys just want to come to America. You know, we don’t want to go to Pandora. America is our Pandora.”

Kahn refers to Pandora, the lush, harmonious and fictional alien-world imagined in the wildly popular new American film, Avatar. In that movie, militant corporate interests from a rusted and barren future Earth arrive on Pandora to mine its precious metals, perpetrating genocide on its native inhabitants along the way. Fantastical? It’s hard to argue with Kahn. American films usually are fantastical – maybe not always  in color, song or dance – but definitely in theme. In the escapist genres, audiences here are often swept into other-worlds of impossible serendipity and orgies of material wealth and fame – signs, perhaps, of our overblown expectations of the good life? But while our national barometer for success spins faster and faster, the rest of the world is eyeing the cars, grocery stores and skyscrapers many of us take for granted as their own golden rings.

Meanwhile, all of this dreaming, striving and consuming is taking place on an increasingly hot, crowded, busy and finite blue dot whipping through space…Fantastical?

NPR has posted full audio and a description of that interview here.

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