Shah Rukh Khan Tends To Put His Foot In His Mouth

There is  a  section  of  idle wanderers  wondering why  I’ve extended  my  unconditional  support to  Shah Rukh Khan and  his  family during their time of crisis. Is it because  he is King Khan?  Or because  I am his friend? Or because I  simply want to  suck up to royalty?

None of the above, my dear friends. None of the above. My heart reaches out to  SRK and his wife during their  hour of crisis because as a father I understand their pain. If  my daughter  sneezes  in Delhi I catch the Covid in Patna. I wonder what  it must feel like to know your  child is  in  one of the  worst prisons  of  Asia, counting every second before he gets bail.

 While we  must sympathize  with the parents’ predicament I  have to  point out  here that Shah Rukh Khan , though one of the most  loquacious and articulate  stars I’ve met , tends to go overboard with his  quips and barbs, and he knows  it. His comments on Simi Garewal’s show, though not to be taken seriously are typical of  his brash  verbosity  when he was younger. When  you are  Shah Rukh Khan you can’t be funny about your ambitions for  your  2-year old son’s  sexual and  narcotic preferences.

 Many  years ago   when I had asked him during an interview why he’s a chain smoker he drawled back, “Your  friend(he named  an A-lister whom I was  at that time  very close to) likes to f…k. I like to smoke.”

Mind it,this was said  during an interview. I didn’t dare use it. Then  during another conversation while speaking about a top actress of the 1990s(who is my  raakhee sister) SRK quipped, “She  is a pathological liar, the  kind who would be standing in front of you in a white dress and ask, ‘How  do you  like my black dress?’ ”

Once in 2000 when  I  was  on the way to meet  SRK  after  visiting the biggest star  of  all (and a dear friend) I phoned to  say I’d be  late. He replied, “Did he delay you? Right now he has no work. He has all the  the time in the world to chat with you.”

Of course these are off the cuff-remarks meant to sustain his reputation as a repartee-ist ,  not  to be taken seriously.

But what do we say about an interview he gave to (the now-defunct)  Tehalka(owned by Tarun Tejpal)  where a spiteful journalist  asked him how he  could bear  to entertain  “a shallow journalist  like Subhash  K Jha”

Instead of laughing  off  the  question as  any  decent rational star  would  have done, Shah Rukh Khan launched  into a tirade against me, staring with  “I hate  Subhash K Jha,”  blah blah.

I ignored the outburst .A  year later  we met at his  residence in Mannat and he completely denied  having said what he did.

We  moved on.  But  the  point is,he shouldn’t be  so  vocal about  his  likes  and dislikes. Stardom comes  with a  responsibility  and  superstardom  like Shah Rukh Khan’s comes with  a super-responsibility. You have to  watch every word you speak  because  you never  when  it would come back to  bite you.

I don’t  know what lessons Aryan  would learn from the current crisis in his  life. But I do know  his father  would have learnt one lesson: karma  , specially of  the  verbal kind, has a tendency to  make a  comeback when you least expect  or want it to.