Think again. Coz at least I don't pepper my desktop with his wallpapers, let alone my office walls at the university. Heck, the only pictures I have of him lying around in my house are the ones on my DVD and book covers. His smug mugs are not the main reason why I love him and I feel weird having them strewn about my living and working spaces. But not so for our Bollyglobal project head. I'm intrigued. I want to visit this SRK-shrine at Vienna University and see what it really looks like.
Full article: Source
Meet Elke Mader, the head of Bollyglobal, a university project that was started two years ago, to study the behaviour of fans of non-Indian audiences of Bollywood movies. Over to Mehru Jaffer
It is not unusual for Professor Elke Mader, 56, to give a room full of students an anthropological perspective on Bollywood during the day and then walk down to her favourite café in the evening for a chat with her friend Maria, 51.
Mader, vice dean of the Social and Cultural Anthropology department at Vienna University, and Maria, a bank employee, became acquainted with each other because of a common love. The love for Bollywood superstar, Shah Rukh Khan.
But Mader is no ordinary fan. She heads Bollyglobal, a university project that was started two years ago, to study the behaviour of fans of non-Indian audiences of Bollywood movies, particularly those starring Khan. And that is how Mader met Maria.
“Bollyglobal: Researching Indian Popular Cinema in Transcultural Contexts” is an online learning unit, supported by different e-learning tools, that attempts to enhance New Media concepts and courses for both teachers and students at the faculty of Social Sciences. “It is a fascinating look at online media technologies, transcultural communication and cross cultural interaction between the fan communities of Shah Rukh Khan,” says Mader, whose office walls on the fifth floor at the Vienna University are plastered with posters of SRK. The online anthropological study collects information on how non-South Asians relate to Indian films in general and to Khan’s films in particular. She also meets up with fans and travels with fan communities to events, organised in different parts of Europe, where the superstar is performing.
“We study the reaction of audiences here to love stories, emotions, and gender portrayal in Bollywood films and to values, attitudes, and ways of life as represented in these films,” adds the author of The Anthropology of Myths. Of particular interest to Mader is the role of the New Media in having connected audiences of Indian cinema globally.
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