Weird Science Of Aamir Khan!

He flips out over scripts his retinue read as suicide. He greenlights roles for the feels, not future TRPs. Which in fickle Bollywood, should foretell tales of swift to middling failure. So how has Aamir Khan, this recidivist risk-taker, parlayed his unscientific method into one of the most successful film careers of all time? Yeah. He is not sure either.

- Dave Besseling

Aamir Khan is so polite, he raps on the door of his own sea-view sitting room, peeks a set of tortoiseshell frames around the panelling and requests shyly, “Can I come in?”

Hey man, it’s your house. You’ve got swarthy security mumbling into walkie-talkies by the front door, a uniformed, armed police officer puttering around the kitchen, and going by the hem strains on that figure-hugging T-shirt that follows your head into the room, you could probably bench press either one of them. Both of them at once. You don’t need to ask anyone if you can do anything around here, pal.

And yet, it’s one of the most recognizable men in this country; a cultural icon who knocks his own movies off the tops of the biggestearner charts for sport; the social crusader whose TV show reached 500 million eyeballs, who’s grinning inquisitively, chuckling demurely, asking permission for things in his own house.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asks, squatting himself into a squishy section of sectional couch, throwing left black-boot foot over right beige corduroy lap.

Confirming not only that I wouldn’t mind but would endeavour to join him, Aamir graciously shares his pack of fags, a stash in which we make a respectable dent over an afternoon’s formal interview, throughout which his humility, his candour, his easy repartee, are, frankly, a little off-putting. For a Bandra-living Bollywood Khan, who’s had this high a high profile for this long, there’s no dirt, no real dirt on the guy. He’s never been banned from a cricket stadium for alleged drunken mischief (Shah Rukh), never been dragged into court for punching a loudmouth in the face (Saif), poaching endangered fauna in Rajasthan (Saif, Salman) or ploughing an SUV over homeless people (also Salman).