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Tears roll down uncontrollably. My little pack of paper tissues turn into a wet ball of mush. My friends on either side of me are amused and embarrassed, in equal measure. And, I am not even halfway through watching My Name Is Khan. You see, I am one of those unfortunate always-on-tap weepies who even cry in a schmaltzy television soap opera.

Yet out in the clear light of day, the tears and compassion all spent, it suddenly strikes me that we have been had. Have we just seen a lie unfold before us for three long hours? WhileShah Rukh Khan’s limited range of histrionics goes from hamming to a little less hamming, with moments of exemplary acting, the hugely popular star is not to blame.

It is the script and the director. My problem is the screen interpretation of Asperger’s syndrome by the title character. Asperger’s is the mildest form of autism. Yet, Khan seems to be afflicted with a bouquet of maladies: there are shades of obsessive compulsive disorder (remember Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets avoiding stepping on the line between pavement slabs).

The screen Khan has a strange walk, symptomatic of a neurological disorder. His head is perpetually bent to one side. His eyes are expressionless, almost unseeing and he never looks anybody in the eye: it is only in the more severe instances of autism that this happens.

No wonder some families of autistic children have objected to the depiction of autism in this film.

Suddenly, disability (of diverse kinds) seems to have become a hot topic for popular cinema. There has been a spate of mainstream films focused on differently enabled protagonists in recent years: Paa, Taare Zameen Par, Black, Khamoshi, Koi Mil Gaya, amongst others.

Coming up are Guzaarish, a film in which Hrithik Roshan plays a paraplegic in a wheel chair. In Anurag Basu’s new film Ranbir Kapoor plays a mute character. Apparently, Nishikant Kamath who made Mumbai Meri Jaan is making one on bipolar disorder. And I am convinced that there are many other projects with disabled heroes and heroines in the pipeline.

Obviously, Hollywood has been and is the inspiration: from Rainman with a remarkable, award-winning performance by Dustin Hoffman enacting the role of an autistic man to more recently, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a film that could have but didn’t get an Oscar for Brad Pitt for the portrayal of man who is born old but progressively gets younger.

American and European actors have long been attracted by such roles because they are challenging and allow them to stretch their acting abilities to the utmost. Think Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. Vittorio Gassman in the original Italian version was even better. These are Oscar-baiting roles.

No wonder actors like Hrithik Roshan, Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan and younger A-list stars are interested in playing these roles. Certainly, such films were made in the past — Sparsh and Khamosh to name a couple. However, such films were few and far between. My only worry with a rash of such films is the misleading depiction of the disabilities.

In Black, for instance, the little blind girl is shown as uncontrollable and wild (almost like the possessed child in Exorcist) and not just visually impaired. In fact, Amitabh Bachchan’s character is supposed to suffer from Alzheimer’s, yet he seems to be afflicted with Parkinson’s as well.

Moreover, Rani Mukherjee (the child grown-up) is made to walk with her stick like Charlie Chapin, with shades of Raj Kapoor’s Chaplinesque turn in the beginning of his film Shri 420. To boot, she also keeps walking past a cinema hall showing a Chaplin movie. This visual pun is not funny.

My advice, for whatever it is worth, to cineastes and actors is to have medical experts on the sets.