All that we already know about Shah Rukh Khan!

Reading the introduction chapter of ‘Shah Rukh Khan: Legend Icon Star’ by Mohar Basu took me back to January 2023 when the advance bookings opened and a notification popped up on my phone. In less than two minutes, I had booked a ticket. After all, the king was back after four years. Oops, chaar saal, ek mahina, chaar din. Pathaan finally hit theatres after quite some drama. For four long years, fans waited patiently watching his interviews and reading about him — there’s no dearth of both!

One of the first few books I read which mentioned Shah Rukh was Deeptha Khanna’s ‘The Year I Turned 16’. I saw a small picture of Shah Rukh on the book at a Scholastic book fair in school. I picked it up. I was a teenager then and finished it in a week. The author refers to him by the name ‘Shrook’ and describes him as this handsome-looking man with ‘s’-shaped eyebrows. It was about the same time when Mushtaq Sheikh’s coffee table book ‘Still Reading Khan’ was released. It was an expensive book and still is. So for most of us who couldn’t afford it, our knowledge about the actor came from interviews we read in magazines and newspapers. 

Thus having grown up following Shah Rukh, Basu’s book was hardly impressive. The author rehashes old interviews of the actor with popular publications, from books like Anupama Chopra’s ‘Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Cinema’ and shows like Farooq Sheikh’s ‘Jeena Isika Naam Hai’, David Letterman’s ‘My Next Guest’, Simi Garewal’s ‘Rendezvous’, among others. There are so many different ways one can write about Shah Rukh. Sharanya Bhattacharya’s book, ‘Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh’ for example, brilliantly delves into stories of women from diverse backgrounds and class groups united as fans of the superstar. 

In fact, nobody has analysed Shah Rukh’s acting style. Everybody writes about how a film landed on him and how certain roles put him on a global platform. Hardly anything has been written about how he prepared for these roles and approached these characters — all the technical aspects of acting. Here too, the author just indulges in glorifying an already celebrated man. These films have been analysed over and over again. After a point, it all gets quite exhausting.

While it hardly has anything we don’t already know about him, Basu does make interesting observations. She wonders if the superstar would remain as wonderful as he is now if he was called Abdul Rahman (Khan’s grandmother had named him so). A fascinating thought, indeed. Who knows! After all, what’s in a name? 

In one of the chapters about Shah Rukh’s portrayal of the bad boys, a fan tells Basu, ‘We say we’re bored of cinema and people aren’t going to the theatres. Why should they? Are you taking bold risks and making outrageous movies? No, you aren’t. People who risk big, win big, and Darr, Baazigar, and Anjaam, all stand for that! Cinema is meant to evoke something. If it was flat, it would be called life.’ — I believe this is one of the most powerful lines in the book. Isn’t it true? Are our films as great as before? But when Shah Rukh arrived with three films after a four-year hiatus in 2023, we saw audiences back in theatres. 

Basu writes that Shah Rukh, growing up in the era of the Angry Young Man, was a huge Amitabh Bachchan fan. He loved even the flop movies of the superstar.

Shah Rukh is our Amitabh.

Just the other day my friend and I sat watching Jab Harry Met Sejal. It’s a really bad film but we just watched it all over again — saying the dialogues out loud and singing the songs. As John Abraham rightly said at the Pathaan press meet, Shah Rukh is truly an emotion. In my favourite chapter in the book where the author writes about ‘The Man Everyone Loves, and Wants’, the author’s friend Amin, says ‘I blame Shah Rukh for the fact that I am single. My expectations are so high.’ This rings true for some of us — here is a man who has set the bar too high. And for those who have had bad experiences with the men in their lives, Shah Rukh brings hope.

While the book may not amuse die-hard fans of the superstar, it is a great read for those unfamiliar with the actor, if they do exist! Not to forget, some rare photographs in the book are a treat.