GOING ALL OUT: (Top) A poster of the film 3 Idiots. (Left) The star gives a hair cut during a promo for Ghajini

If it’s December, it’s got to be Aamir Khan. The Christmas season is fast approaching, and the actor is revving up for the promotion of his new film 3 Idiots. Of late, the last month of the year, particularly the last week, has become an “Aamir Khan special” in Bollywood. In 2007, he released his directorial debut Taare Zameen Par around Christmas to a very warm response. In 2008, he repeated the feat with the blockbuster Ghajini.

So in 2009, the actor is looking forward to a good year-end — and doing all that he can do right now to ensure that the film gathers eyeballs.

His clever promotional strategies for TZP and Ghajini demonstrated that Shah Rukh is not the only marketing king in the industry. Aamir Khan — who thought of innovative ways to promote his earlier films — has now stepped out of his den to endorse 3 Idiots, which is slated to roll out by the end of December.

Khan plays an IIT student in Rajkumar Hirani’s film, which is said to be loosely based on Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller Five Point Someone. Kareena Kapoor will be seen opposite Khan for the very first time in the film, which also stars two of his co-stars from Rang De Basanti — R. Madhavan and Sharman Joshi.

To catch the attention of the target audience, Khan is interacting with college students in a film promotional spree. The actor, who recently got back to India after holidaying in France, attends a college function in Mumbai where he is the guest of honour. The talk is all about schools and colleges, but the film crops up — cleverly — every now and then.

“I really miss going to college. Actually, I was never ‘in’ college,” he says. “As a student I used to be mostly out of college as my heart was in cinema. So in the two years of my college, in the 11th and the 12th, I was mostly in the theatre, working with students of cinema, going to FTII (the Film and Television Institute of India).”

By the time he was 18, he had started working as an assistant director. Classes, by then, had been quietly buried. “So I miss those college years when I see you all having a great time, with so much excitement and positive energy,” the actor says.

The reference to 3 Idiots is subtle. Khan adds that he did get a chance to re-live his student days when he shot for Hirani’s film at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Bangalore a few months ago. “Since I was actually staying there in IIM, I had a good time being with the students,” he says, speaking at length about the right kind of education and how it could bring about a change in society.

Khan, clearly, knows his marketing onions. Keeping the larger canvas of TZP in mind — the film was about a dyslexic child — Khan had tried to draw in kids with a painting competition for children. He had also made an appearance on the Zee TV show Sa Re Ga Ma Lil Champs — a music contest for kids. But when it came to Ghajini, the reclusive actor went all out to market his film with a flurry of smart campaigns.

Apart from walking the ramp for Van Heusen, the stylists of his film, just days before the release of Ghajini, he also got the ushers of one of the multiplex chains that was running Shah Rukh’s film Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi to adopt his bold Ghajini hairstyle. It led to a bit of badinage between the two superstars.

“He thinks he can ride off the brand that is Shah Rukh Khan,” SRK said when he heard about the stunt. Aamir responded with a nonchalant, “Shah Rukh has been speaking about himself for the last 20 years, so there is nothing new about it”, before completing his bullish run to the box office.

If he spent a whole year in the gym to beef himself up to look the revenge-seeking tycoon in Ghajini, the perfectionist actor did just the opposite to gain a slim look for 3 Idiots. Not surprisingly, he looks almost like the students when he mingles with them on college campuses.

Khan’s played a student in films — and he has played a teacher. In TZP, he was a master who helped the troubled boy find his feet. “I have done a lot of films which have been extremely successful. But I have to say that the biggest high that I ever got in my career was when I made TZP. I feel blessed that I got an opportunity to be a part of a film like this and being part of the process of understanding each other and trying to remove our differences,” he says.

Khan prefers to let his teaching do the talking these days. “What better contribution can teachers make to a society than helping another human being and changing his life dramatically in a positive and better way by making them happy?” he asks.

But Khan doesn’t miss his lighter moments. These days, the word “idiot” seems to have become almost an integral part of his vocabulary. He uses the word lavishly in any given conversation, evoking considerable mirth. When he returned from France, a television reporter asked him if was interrogated by the airport authorities the way SRK was in the United States two months ago.

“No one checks me as I am an idiot,” Aamir replied jovially. He went on to add that SRK faced a problem because he was “very intelligent”. The implication, perhaps, was that SRK had marketed his airport incident as a publicity stunt for his forthcoming film, My Name is Khan. Aamir Khan, who knows the ways of the market too, is going the same way. His name, after all, is also Khan.