Asoka, the Bollywood film with Hollywood aspirations, officially comes to town on Friday, thirsting to break records and take Hindi cinema into the big league, but it has at least already crossed the crucial high-water mark of Western media hype.

"I’m not treating it like an Asian film, I’ve employed a proper PR company and you can see that in the way it’s been treated in the Western media," Asoka’s UK distributor Martin Myers told The Times of India.