I love Bollywood movies. That’s why I was a little surprised to see in this article that Shahrukh Khan was stopped and questioned for an hour at a U.S. airport. As a famous movie star, he is probably more used to answering interview questions from reporters than immigration officers! Can you imagine Brad Pitt or Jackie Chan being stopped at an airport? I bet they would be a bit surprised, too!
There are some interesting words and phrases in this article, too. The first is in the first paragraph where it is mentioned that he was ‘singled out‘ for interrogation. ‘Single out‘ is a great phrasal verb meaning to choose one person or thing form a group. We usually follow it with the preposition ‘for‘ as in the example above.
The next interesting word comes in the second paragraph where Kahn is quoted as saying he was ‘hassled‘. To ‘hassle‘ someone is to cause trouble or disruption for him or her. We can use it as a noun, too. E.g. this delay has caused me a lot of hassle.
It’s mentioned later that this ‘sparked outrage‘ in India. In this sense ‘sparked‘ means the same as ’caused’. There is another example of this usage of the word in this article.
There are another couple of interesting phrases a little later on where Ambika Soni is quoted as saying:
“I don’t understand how in the name of religion, frisking can be done for anyone like this.”
‘In the name of‘ means ‘because of’ and ‘frisking‘ is the kind of search airport security guards do when they feel your body to make sure you are not carrying anything that could be dangerous.
In the last paragraph, Mahesh Bhatt is quoted as saying the last ‘Islamophobia wave‘ had been very harsh. When we use ‘wave‘ in this sense, we mean a large number of events of a similar type. In this instance, it would mean a large number of instances of people behaving in an ‘islamophobic’ manner.
Today’s photo is by Roger Fischlin.