The Khan story
SAVITHA GAUTAM
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Film critic Anupama Chopra on Shah Rukh Khan and her third book.
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The man behind the myth has been unmasked in Film Critic Anupama Chopra’s third book.
The man and the myth: Anupama Chopra with Shah Rukh Khan.
It is 1958. The city is Delhi. The place is India Gate. A strapping unemployed youth, Meer Taj Mohammed, rescues a pretty lass, Fatima Lateef, from a car accident and donates blood to save her life. She survives and love blossoms. They get married in
1959 and have two children.
hen the son is 15, Meer loses a battle with cancer leaving his daughter mentally maimed for life. His son too is shattered but vows to take care of his mother and sister. The son grows up and falls in love with a Hindu girl. He travels to Mumbai to woo her and wins her.
But fate intervenes again and he loses his mother in Delhi. Depressed and lost, the young man comes to Mumbai and tells his filmmaker friend, Viveck, “Let’s make films.” And then declares, “One day I am going to rule this city” (read Mumbai).
Sounds like a Bollywood film script? Could be. But that’s actor Shah Rukh Khan’s life for you. The man behind the myth has been unmasked in film critic Anupama Chopra’s third book, King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and
The Seductive World of Indian Cinema.
The biography traces the life of an Urdu poetry-spouting boy who faces life with the same conviction as he does the camera in later life; it’s the story of a boy who dreams of becoming an Army officer but becomes one of Hindi cinema’s most charismatic and successful actors.
“While writing my second book, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenga, the idea of doing a book on Shah Rukh germinated,” says Chopra. “As I interviewed him for that book, I encountered a fascinating person. His personal sto
ry was so dramatic that I wanted to write about him. Also, Shah Rukh is a prominent face of modern India, an India which has Bollywood as its brand ambassador today.”
Not an easy task
But getting the Khan to talk about himself was not so easy. Recalls Chopra, “His first reaction was ‘Why me?’ He was actually embarrassed. But I pursued him for six months before he relented. But once he did, he was completely honest. What I admire about him was that, at no point, did he tell me what to write and what to leave out.”
Chopra got fresh perspectives by talking to people close to his parents. Like producer Bobby Bedi’s father who was in jail with Shah Rukh’s father during the Freedom Struggle. “But the main tool of research was interviews with SRK.”
Shah Rukh Khan has been the subject of many books in recent times. So how different is this one, one would ask. Chopra weaves the life of Bollywood’s badshah around the events that were shaping modern India and creating a new
global brand called Bollywood. In Shah Rukh’s words, “Whoever reads the book will have clear … understanding of Bollywood and of course, me.”
“Yes, this book is the story of India with Bollywood as its backdrop and Shah Rukh as the lead actor for an audience comprising not just Indians but Americans as well,” says Chopra, who has been writing about cinema since 1993 for India Today, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Chopra’s first book was Sholay: The Making Of A Classic.
Chopra’s narrative is simple and easy-to-read. As you turn the pages, you encounter a Shah Rukh who faces quite a bit of humiliation and rejection but works his way up with sheer grit. You begin to admire the man.
The book is peppered with interesting titbits. He was a great Amitabh Bachchan fan and watched all his films. And who accompanies him to the theatre? Amrita Singh. Here’s some more trivia: he played a small part along with Arundhati Roy in “In Which Annie Gives It To Those Ones”. As a kid, he would “imitate the hip-swivelling walk and coquettish manner” of actor Mumtaz.
Trivia apart, as the book progresses, the myth overshadows the man. So, the second half of the book is about his infamous brush with the mafia, his foray into film production, his jumping on to the product endorsements bandwagon, and his special friends Aziz Mirza (who’s almost like a father to SRK), Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra. But as Shah Rukh says in the book, “I am just an employee of the Shah Rukh Khan myth.”
Complete entertainer
Chopra, who’s unapologetic about being “a die-hard SRK fan and a Bollywood person to the core”, says, “He is a complete entertainer, on and off screen. And that’s what makes him endearing. He’s articulate, funny, and surprisingly normal. No starry nakhras.”
However, one gets the feeling that if you peel off that “I am happy; I am funny; I am a brat” mask, you meet a man who is still battling his demons and is lonely at times.
In fact, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali chose SRK to play Devdas because he “had the saddest eyes... and the dominant note in his personality was an enduring, unhealed hurt.”
As for Chopra, writing is a genetic thing for her. Mother Kamna Chandra and sister Tanuja are script writers; brother Vikram Chandra is a successful author (“He’s my first reader”) and husband Vidhu Vinod Chopra is a filmmaker. Her favourite films are “Sholay and DDLJ”. And she adds, “If there’s one actor I find extremely intriguing, it’s Rajnikanth!”
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