“Nusrat minal lahi wah fatahun kareeb.” “God give me the strength to win”. Shah Rukh Khan with swollen eyes knelt on a Sajaadah in the parking lot of a hospital reciting this 869 times; confident that with this prayer, there wasn’t a force in the universe that could take his mother away. Fatima Khan passed away an hour later. Shah Rukh lost the “noor” of his eye (the apple of his eye). There was nothing to win or lose, his 869 prayers were denied, and it was all just gone. A week after mourning for his mother, he flew back to Mumbai, barged into Vickas Veswani’s house and said, “Lets make movies.”
Shah Rukh’s initial years in Mumbai consisted of working for a small budget soap opera – Fauji (Soldier), which was anything but a success. However, it garnered just enough attention for celebrity director – Subhash Ghai to set his eyes on him and envision the next big thing to happen to Indian celluloid. Ghai once on the sets of Fauji approached Shah Rukh and said, “I hear you act well”. Shah Rukh looked him in the eye and unapologetically said, “Yes sir I do.” After this encounter, Subhash remarked, “When they first come, new comers are bent over with their hands folded in supplication. When they become stars, their hands move behind their backs in arrogance, but Shah Rukh’s hands were always straight by his side. His eyes had confidence.” This was the beginning of Shah Rukh’s stardom. He bagged the eccentric role of Raja in his first film ‘Deewana’ (Mad Lover), in which he plays an obsessed lover who goes to any lengths to be united with his lover. Shah Rukh gave every last drop of his blood, sweat, and the occasional tear into this film. He believed that because he had already lost everything, he might as well gamble whatever he has left and test whether the stars would be aligned for him this time. They were.
After almost a week of empty theatres, Deewana became a phenomenon, a cult film that no Indian Cinema fan has forgotten till today. Shah Rukh continued to amaze people with his diverse roles and ability to add his own dynamics to every character he played; from a con man, to an aspiring entrepreneur, to an alcoholic. The one thing all his performances did have in common though, was the conviction and zest with which he embodied every character; and the ease with which he got into the skin of someone else. To describe how he did this, many years later in an interview, Khan said, “performing for others to some means wearing masks to play roles. I try to be as faceless as a feeling…a good feeling” (Shah Rukh Khan). Very soon, Shah Rukh became the best romantic hero the nation had seen, and was unquestionably labeled as the ‘King of romance’ with his back to back hits such as “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai”, “Dilwale Dulhaniya Lejaayenge”, and many more, breaking records worldwide. Not only this, Shah Rukh also seamlessly managed to weave Western trends such as Polo shirts and Gap sweatpants with Indian values, to give audiences worldwide a cocktail of what modern-day Indian cinema will look like in years to come. This is what set Shah Rukh apart from the rest of his contemporaries.
However, Shah Rukh’s stars weren’t always aligned; in fact, for almost 25 years of his life, they were invisible. Shah Rukh by his loved ones was always known to be the one who beat all odds, and make the impossible happen. Even at birth, with the umbilical cord looped around his neck, the doctors were sure he would come out as a stillborn. Khan emerged unscathed, crying his lungs out to make his presence obvious, as he did in the years to come on a slightly larger scale. The nurses interpreted this cord as a blessing of lord Hanuman – the divine monkey god. The child, they predicted, would be very lucky.
However, for every gain, Shah Rukh had several losses. One loss that he would give up anything for was his father. There was no one he treasured more than his father, his anchor, and most of all, the reason he became the man he is today. However, Meer Khan (Shah Rukh’s father) passed away from oral cancer several years before his stardom. Twelve-year-old Shah Rukh closed his father’s lifeless eyes with his own hands, kissed his cold forehead and got into the driving seat of the car to take his mother home. When Fatima asked him when he learnt how to drive, he twisted the key in the hole, and declared, “just now.”
Having lost both his parents and gaining stardom within five years of landing in Mumbai, Shah Rukh and his long-term girlfriend Gauri decided to tie the knot, and break the hearts of millions of women around the world who fantasized about him as the ideal husband. However, Shah Rukh was no ideal husband. He was possessive, obsessive and most of all extremely irrational in his decision-making. Having lost everyone he loved, Shah Rukh’s insecurity infested his relationships like a disease; some survived, others died off because of it. His close friend and director Aditya Chopra however, had a theory that explained his erratic behavior and tendency to be a spineless people-pleaser. He said, “Shah Rukh doesn’t want you to love him as a star. He is trying in a very strange way through his acting to make you love him. It has a lot to do with the loss of his parents. They aren’t there anymore and he’s reaching out and substituting their loss with the world.”
As a spectator, one can only conclude that being Shah Rukh Khan for forty-seven years must be exhausting if not impossible to keep up with. Indian Cinema’s audience of over a billion people has been able to berate him, idolize him, vilify and criticize him, but the one thing Shah Rukh Khan has made it impossible for people to do, is ignore him. His presence, like a feeling, lingers in every Indian’s mind; good or bad is irrelevant because he is always there and will be for a very long time. Shah Rukh Khan has made this his approach to not only stardom, but to life as a whole because of an unforgettable experience he had with his father at the age of eleven. At the THINK2012 press conference, Shah Rukh shared an encounter he had witnessing his father cry on the ‘No Man’s Land’ between India and Pakistan, failing to reunite the two countries as a freedom fighter:
“I don’t want to die like my father did, I don’t want to die unknown. As much as I like calling my father a successful failure, I just want to be bloody successful.”
n provide us with enough time to untangle and comprehend it.
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