SRK Scanner PR stunt
By Shalini Singh

Even as terrorists use more ingenious ways to smuggle in weapons and explosives on board planes, security services are working out ways to stop them at Airport. The latest such measure is the full-body scanner which uses two technologies to detect prohibited items.  The first type of full body scanner uses high frequency radio waves and the second uses X-Rays.

Even as Bollywood super star Shah Rukh Khan has been giving serious media interviews after Shiv Sena announced a ban on his film ‘My name is Khan’, his publicity machine is in overdrive abroad to promote the movie.

On Feb 6, Shah Rukh told British TV: “I was in London recently going through the airport and these new machines have come up, the body scans. You've got to see them. It makes you embarrassed - if you're not well endowed. You walk into the machine and everything - the whole outline of your body - comes out. Then I saw these girls - they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said 'give them to me' - and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them.”

The idea was to say something clever, interesting and controversial to create buzz for his new movie My Name is Khan.

And for the next week, it certainly got publicity.  IANS, Yahoo and at least a dozen national newspapers in the western world published stories about Shah Rukh Khan autographing printouts of his body scans.  The western media lapped up the story so much that serious media organizations like Huffington Post and even Techdirt wrote about the privacy issues involved in such new technology.

Shah Rukh Khan’s PR team allowed such stories to circulate on the website for 1 week knowing fully well that they were not true. And they could cause discomfort to passengers using such machines in Europe. But they kept quiet because the buzz would ensure SRK would be in everyone’s attention and so more would see his film which is about a Muslim who travels to meet the US President to tell him that he is not a terrorist.

Yesterday, the Telegraph carried a rebuttal by a British Airport spokeswoman who described the claims as “completely factually incorrect” because the machines could not print images.  Also, that the machines were only used for departing passengers so it could not have been used when SRK flew into the country for the TV interview.