Greatest paisa vasool moment in Iron Man: Jeff Bridges, the Big Lebowski, whispering ‘Tumhara tofa sirf yeh hai‘ in bad phonetic Hindi into Faran Tahir’s ear.

Second best: Bridges’ first appearance as Obadiah Stane (get it?), his beard gelled and squared off like a Sikh soldier’s.

And: Two cute desi-ish reporters played by Meera Simhan and Irani-American actress Nazanin Boniadi, seen here as a proto-desi.

Best credit: Egyptian-American actor Ahmed Ahmed as a character named Ahmed.

Weakest: Tahir playing a glowering, crypto-desi Afghanistan terrorist. First Hollywood hated Russians and loved Afghans. Now Afghans are the new Russkies.

And: Random bits of Hindi/Urdu all over the script, along with some Arabic. Dari and Pashto ought to be the most common languages in the country.

The Irani-desi crossover is fair. We borrow their beauties for plays and steal their terrorist roles, they play cabbies and desi pervs. It’s an even exchange.

And the movie itself? One of the better comic book movies — but still one based on comics. Calling the villains cartoonish would be a tautology. Robert Downey Jr. sometimes seemed half-hearted; this is no Charlie Bartlett. Inventing the wicked-cool armored suit chewed up far too much screen time. The suit hovers primly with arms at its side, palms outstretched like a ballerina, more Iron Maid than Man. The final throwdown is prèt-à-porter.

But Iron Man is based on Howard Hughes, and these Bruce Wayne-ish tales of self-made polymaths are always fascinating. Check out the profile of Nathan Myhrvold in the New Yorker:

Intellectual Ventures just had a patent issued on automatic, battery-powered glasses, with a tiny video camera that reads the image off the retina and adjusts the fluid-filled lenses accordingly, up to ten times a second. It just licensed off a cluster of its patents, for eighty million dollars…

[Bill Gates:] ‘There’s this idea they have where you can track moving things by counting wing beats. So you could build a mosquito fence and clear an entire area… They also came up with this idea to stop hurricanes. Basically, the waves in the ocean have energy, and you use that to lower the temperature differential.’ [Link]

Myhrvold has ideas, but Dean Kamen’s actually built them. These are our real-life superheroes.