Table Of Content

P King of Bollywood P King of Bollywood Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema ANUPAMA CHOPRA Copyright © 2007 by Anupama Chopra All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Warner Books Hachette Book Group USA 237 Park Avenue New York, NY 10017 Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com. First eBook Edition: August 2007 ISBN: 0-446-50893-4 1. Khan, Shah Rukh. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—India— Biography. I. Title. For Agni and Zuni, my sun and my moon, and Vinod Acknowledgments This book was born in the summer of 2003, when I fi rst spoke to Shah Rukh Khan about writing a book on him. He hesitated and said that he didn’t think he deserved it. I per- sisted and convinced him otherwise. First and foremost, I would like to thank him for his affection and support, his patience with my badgering over the next four years, and his generosity with the only thing he doesn’t have: time. Over the years, many other people helped to give this project a shape. I would like to thank Karan Johar and the crew at Dharma Productions, Fawzan Husain, Rahul Nanda, Joy Datta, Savitha Narayanan, Dinesh Raheja, Jitendra Kothari, Raeshem Nijhon, Rakesh and Preeti Maria, Ram Madhwani, S. Hussain Zaidi, Arun Katiyar, Shankar Aiyar, Sheela Raval, Jitesh Pillai, Kiran Rao, Kishore Lulla, Alice Coehlo at Eros, Faizal Sharif, Krishna Desai, Shankra Pillai, Mihiri Kanjirath, Sujoy Das and Rajesh Sharma at the India Today library, and the crew at Vinod Chopra Films. vii viii Acknowledgments I would like to especially thank Nasreen Munni Kabir for her support and Leo Mirani for his invaluable help with research. I would like to thank Suketu Mehta for introducing me to my wonderful agent Anna Ghosh. I would like to thank Anna for her encouragement and unstinting support. She made this possible. I would also like to thank my editors at Warner Books, Devi Pillai and Natalie Kaire. I would like to thank my husband Vidhu Vinod Chopra for his patience with papers strewn around the bedroom and keyboard sounds at 5 a.m., and for always putting things in perspective with a lewd Punjabi joke. I would like to thank my parents, Navin and Kamna Chandra, and my sister Tanuja. And fi nally, I would like to thank my brother Vikram Chandra, who is my fi rst reader and guide. Contents Cast of Characters, in Order of Appearance xi 1 Bollywood Dreams 1 2 Peshawar: The Street of the Storytellers 16 3 A “Lady-Killer” Is Born 27 4 No-Man’s-Land 39 5 You Should Be in the Movies 53 6 Scandal in Panscheel Park 66 7 The Television Years 79 8 Life After Death 89 9 Super Brat 101 10 Murder, He Wrote 118 11 The Brave-Hearted Takes the Box Offi ce 130