Shah Rukh Khan: 'Dignity Is More Important Than Hashtags.'

‘Woh aaye ghar mein hamare, khuda ki kudrat hai/Kabhi hum unko kabhi apne ghar ko dekhte hain….’ If Shahrukh Khan were to ever drop in at someone’s house, this might be the perfect couplet to describe that moment. But it’s he, the Badshah of Bollywood, who has a backstory for this Ghalib gem. Nothing around him—the feverish promotional melee, hopping from one vanity van to the other to meet co-actors, producers et al, delayed lunches, the disarmingly innocent AbRam who demands his dad’s time over “boring interviews”—is conducive to ruminating about poetry. But SRK shares an anecdote about how this couplet was inspired by a kleptomaniac friend of Ghalib’s and then goes on to the symbolic importance of the ‘saaqi’ figure in shayari. He cherishes his father’s reading of poetry, his words of explanation, and promises that none of the chaos will distract him from the conversation at hand, and it would be an interesting one too. Not vainly spoken, as Prachi Pinglay-Plumber discovers. Excerpts:

- Prachi Pinglay-Plumber

You’ve done different things from very early on in your career—playing the bad guy, or the vulnerable romantic, when others were being action heroes; IPL; making the first successful sports film on real events. What prompts you to make these risky decisions?

I think all of us, whatever business we are in, we are all a beat off. Unfortunately, what happens is when you start getting into a system, you start getting on beat and start following the beat… which is also alright because you have enough talent to pull that off too sometimes. But I’ve been fortunate enough—by nature, not by design. I’ve always been far removed from how films work, because I came from outside. I go by a different connotation. No one told me how one is supposed to behave within the film industry. Very often, more decisions of mine still remain offbeat than on. Sometimes I adhere to it. I say okay, let’s just do it. But I do it with the same aplomb and happi­ness. To me it doesn’t seem like a risk.

When I started out, I didn’t know how to be a movie star—there was no uniform­ity given to me, that you are supposed to behave like this, talk like this, go for those parties, have a manager. Or that we’d like you to go in the action category, so you should dress like this, show your muscles…. I think I was so unwise that I did those films! I wouldn’t have done them if I was wiser or on beat. But those unwise things worked. People tend to think they all worked but that’s not true—Asoka didn’t work, Paheli didn’t work, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani didn’t work, and it killed me emotionally. Offbeatness does mess up also but when you get it right, you kind of become unique. I still don’t think of it as a risk.