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ave you ever dialed a wrong number? We all have '€” come on, admit it! In Indonesia we call it salah sambung (wrong connection).

But do you realize, we could also salah sambung when we want to connect with God? Ironically, religion, which is meant to connect us to the Almighty, ends up garbling and distorting the truth and missing its original aim.

This is basically the message that the Bollywood film PK directed by Rajkumar Hirani wants to convey. In this film he teams up again with the talented Aamir Khan after the colossally successful 3 Idiots (2009), which was a sharp critique of India'€™s myopic, rote-learning education system.

Both 3 Idiots and PK are enormously entertaining, but at the same time deliver very important social messages and, in the case of PK, also a timely spiritual one.

What better country to make a satirical film on religion than India? It'€™s a nation characterized by a diversity of religious beliefs and practices and a plethora of gods, not to mention the '€œgodmen'€ who deliberately manipulate people'€™s blind faith for profit. The popular perception is that there are 30 crores (300 million) deities in Hinduism, the country'€™s dominant religion, embraced by about 80.5 percent of the population.

An alien humanoid (played brilliantly by Khan) lands from his flying saucer in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan on a research mission to find out about the customs of earthlings. He arrives in his birthday suit, as the inhabitants of his planet don'€™t wear clothes, nor do they speak any languages. They communicate telepathically as they believe language only serves to confuse, with all the mixed, multiple and manipulated meanings that words can have.

He earns the name PK (pee-kay) '€” meaning '€œtipsy'€ in Hindi '€” as people think he'€™s drunk, due to his strange behavior. With his bulging eyes that seldom blink, arched eyebrows, protruding ears, stilted gait and blood-red lips from constantly chewing paan (betel nut leaf combined with areca nut and slaked lime), he certainly strikes an odd figure.

PK'€™s hands are like a USB cable which can absorb people'€™s thoughts. From the 122 major languages in India he learns Bhojpuri '€” because that is the language of the prostitute, the only person whose hands he can hold without being considered a pervert!

His mission takes on a different focus when the remote-control pendant that can bring him back to his spacecraft '€” and home planet '€” is stolen. He'€™s told that only God can help him find it, and thus begins his earnest and desperate search. In the process, he ends up learning a lot, and exposing people'€™s prejudices, hypocrisies and misguided obsession with religion.

There are hilarious scenes rich in irony where he arrives at a church service with bare feet and pooja ki thali (Hindu offerings consisting of coconut, incense, etc.), and when he tries to bring wine to a mosque because he saw people drinking wine in church.

Other main characters in the movie are a bandmaster (Sanjay Dutt) who becomes a kind of father figure to PK, while in Delhi he meets Jaggu (Anushka Sharma), a TV news reporter, who sees a story in PK, but becomes his best friend and savior. With her help, he manages to locate his remote control, which ended up being the talisman of the overweight and overbearing godman Tapasvee (Saurabh Shukla), who lords over his opulent temple and ashram, built from the donations of (seemingly brainwashed) devotees.

PK challenges Tapasvee to a '€œduel'€ on a TV talk show organized by Jaggu and her boss from the TV station. PK ends up exposing Tapasvee for the manipulating and criminal fraudster that he is. PK awakens people from their stupor and starts what you could call a '€œwrong number'€ hashtag trend, where people all around India start questioning through social media not only Tapasvee, but other authority figures and social ills in the country.

Religion is a super-sensitive matter in India, but it'€™s the same in Indonesia. Only an outsider could ask the kinds of questions about religion or social customs considered taboo for insiders. In My Name is Khan, the film'€™s director used a character with Asperger'€™s syndrome (played by another talented Khan, Shah Rukh Khan). In PK, they use an alien as a plot device to act as a catalyst and game-changer. Both fall into the category of '€œman-child'€ or '€œidiot-savants'€ who are exempt from the religious and social mores that others are bound by.

The reception of PK has been two-sided. On the one hand it broke box office collection records, becoming the highest grossing Hindi film ever. On the other hand, there were protests and calls to ban the film, saying it was an insult to the Hindu religion.

Hirani'€™s response to the latter was, that'€™s funny, because his intention was precisely to uphold the principle of Advait '€” '€œthe oneness of all humans that is central to Indian culture, thought and religion'€. Talk about getting the wrong end of the stick, but that is precisely what the film is about. The phenomenon of '€œwrong number'€ happens so much in today'€™s world and not just in the realm of religion and spirituality.

A film was made in 2011 in Indonesia called ? by Hanung Bramantyo, which also addresses religious hypocrisy and the need to respect Indonesia'€™s pluralism. It was nowhere close to the quality of PK and was far from being a box-office hit. But as with PK, there were protests and calls for it to be banned. What a waste of energy for a film that was pretty mediocre and contrived, but it shows where our sensitivities '€” and ignorance '€” lie.

I challenge Indonesian filmmakers to produce a local version of PK about our hypocrisy-rich and salah sambung nation! Takers, anyone?
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The writer is the author of Julia'€™s Jihad