Khan Power - India Today Cover Story

It’s 3.03 a.m. Shah Rukh Khan, donning a white Gucci vest over his six year-old ripped jeans, his Louis Vuitton backpack discarded on the sofa, is just getting ready to hit the dance floor with the Kolkata Knight Riders.

It’s been a long day but you wouldn’t know it. He’s just got in from London in the afternoon after unveiling his wax statue at Paris’s Musee Grevin. The airlines has lost his luggage on the way.

Stopping at Mumbai for an hour, he’s hopped on to his friend and Videocon MD Venugopal Dhoot’s Cessna Citation, come to Kolkata for the match between the Knight Riders and Mumbai Indians, cheered his losing team, done several television interviews, and even gifted a Compaq notebook to each Knight Rider.

Tomorrow is already being planned today, as his secretary Karuna Badwal informs him of the 2 p.m.-shoot for Star Plus’s new show Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hain?

Eighteen episodes of the show will be shot over the next few days along with work on a quick comedy with Priyadarshan, and then on May 15, he starts filming Aditya Chopra’s Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. “I haven’t slept since January 21, the day I bought the team,” says the man now better known by his snappy initials.

What’s fuelling all this? A handful of chicken tikkas, two biscuits, half a club sandwich, four glasses of Pepsi and a couple of cups of black coffee?

Or the desperate desire to attain immortality as his reign over Bollywood nears its end? An actor is, after all, known by the movies he does, something that Amitabh Bachchan realised after the debacle of ABCL when he had to travel the distance to Yash Chopra’s home one morning and ask for work.

At the heart of Shah Rukh Khan Inc—in the past two years, the actor has earned over Rs 270 crore from movie fees, endorsements and television anchoring—is a 42-yearold who can’t keep still, whose every minute has to be accounted for by some project, for whom the pressure of an enforced eight-month holiday after Om Shanti Om must have stretched like a gigantic question mark when films with southern director Shankar and Munnabhai director Raju Hirani did not work out.

But now with a Rs 300-crore investment in the Indian Premier League (IPL) team over 10 years (an annual investment of $15.5 million, Rs 63 crore, is expected to give the Knight Riders a return of $12.5 million— around Rs 50 crore—in the first year itself), he has expanded his empire to include virtually every aspect of entertainment.

While his Red Chillies Entertainment has a bustling VFX (visual effects) department and produces almost all his advertisements, his live shows, handled by Cineyug, also form a profitable business.

The last Temptations tour of the US in 2004 , for instance, netted a revenue of $15 million (Rs 61 crore). If Bachchan at the peak of his career was a one-man industry, Shah Rukh Khan is one man, many small-scale industries.

Or as he puts it better: “I am just an employee of the Shah Rukh Khan myth.”

As his IPL partners and close friends Jay Mehta and Juhi Chawla look on, his friend Dhoot, sitting meekly in a corner of his plush suite, calls him a natural-born entrepreneur.

Shah Rukh balks at the description, but in effect taking risks is the underpinning of his life since the time he acted as an anti-hero in Abbas Mustan’s Baazigar—a role rejected by Salman Khan—and in Yash Chopra’s Darr, a part turned down by Aamir Khan.

“Korbo, Lorbo, Jeetbo”, the three Bengali words inscribed in his team’s anthem (and dreamed up by director Sujoy Ghosh for music director duo Vishal-Shekhar), describe his life best.

As he puts it: “We have to do, to fight and to win, or die trying.” It’s a work ethic that has seen him become India’s biggest endorsement machine, with 15 brands at the last count, each earning him a pay cheque of Rs 5 crore.

This in addition to stray assignments like launching the new logo of Shoppers’ Stop recently, for which he was paid Rs 1.5 crore for a couple of hours of work. “When I started building my house, I realised I wasn’t going to do bad films for money. The opportunity cost was too high. It was a Keynesian matter of demand being fulfilled by supply. I decided to dance at weddings or endorse brands for it,” he says.

That has paid off. The 20,000-sq-ft, Rs 100-crore fairytale seaside mansion to which he has added a wing to house his office, gym and a den which can accommodate makeshift television sets (last year for Kaun Banega Crorepati 3 and this year for Paanchvi Pass) is built entirely with his blood and sweat—and he is not always being ironic when he describes it as the most famous address in India, yes even more than Rashtrapati Bhavan.

His competitive spirit is legendary. He hates losing even to friends in board games like Articulate and Trivial Pursuit. “A lot of people think I live in a comfort zone. I do a lot of things not on a whim but on an inner voice that tells me why not,” he says, sounding like his biggest fan.

Anything can be a trigger. In the case of IPL, it was the criticism of appearing at cricket matches to market his production, Om Shanti Om.

“You know, when I was growing up, my mother could only afford to buy me tickets for one match. I remember it was an India-Pakistan match where Imran Khan made 32 runs. I don’t need a cricket match to promote myself but I love it that my son has the opportunity that his father can take him to cricket matches perhaps in a private plane. If my mother could afford a team for me she would have bought it. I could, so I bought it.”

The other trigger was his son’s (Aryan, aged 10) comment to him at 2.30 one morning—in Shah Rukh Khan’s world, food and sleep are rationed commodities and SMSes are responded to till 5 in the morning—that he buy a team on his own.

“He told me, ‘Papa, we are rulers, not servants. Let’s do this alone’. I woke up my wife (Gauri) in turn and told her this. She wasn’t very happy.”

If Shah Rukh is an example to his colleagues (musician Vishal Dadlani says his passion is infectious), it is his children who are his inspiration.

“I play hockey and soccer with them at home. I train them for running. That’s why my daughter always comes first in races. I think sports instill in people the habit of winning, no matter who the opposition is,” he says.

Often they also provide him with the best ideas, which he dashes out on his laptop in his trademark all-caps. The attention to detail is obsessive—from the buttons on the uniforms of the Kolkata Knight Riders to the 145 potential names he thought of for his team (among them were WWEinfluenced gems like The Hitmen, Anti-Matter, Ball Breakers, Dominators, Kolkata Cannons and Hangmen).

Their logo, All the King’s Men, is his idea as well, a play on his status as the king of Bollywood. It is a status magnified when he is taken out of context. In Kolkata, 10 guards surround his slight frame, not his customary two; a 20-ft cut-out graces the entrance of Eden Gardens and entire stands rise when he turns around to orchestrate their applause.

Khan’s can do-isms

* "I’ve heard about my brand. I’m manipulative, I run after money. Whatever. My logic is I’m a brand because I put passion into my work."

* "I’m a bit of a fakir. I wear the nicest clothes because they’re given to me. I don’t think of food, air and water as necessities."

* "I never do a film for money. You can buy me for everything but a film. Films I do for love."

* "I believe in trying something new. The more people tell me I’m wrong, the more I believe I can do it."

* "You have to believe in something. I believe my children are untainted. If they say I’m the best I am."

* "I’ve seen death from very close quarters. After that, failure doesn’t scare you. Only if you fail will you succeed."

Shah Rukh is hands-on with almost every aspect of his work. He has a small team that helps him—the unflappable Badwal looks after his schedule, the three Morani brothers take care of his live acts, the Red Chillies team handles ads and VFX, Sanjiv Chawla (Juhi’s brother) runs the film production, while Mehta (Juhi’s husband and an industrialist) is in charge of the IPL team administration.

Of course, the ecosystem is entirely dependent on the actor, who is in turn a function of his movies. His last two movies have done well at the box office, generating a combined revenue of Rs 150 crore, but as his experience with the Rs 15-crore Paheli showed, not even his generous backing as a producer can prevent a turkey.

In terms of his movie career, he is working less than the slog-master Akshay Kumar, whose four films in 2007 grossed Rs 350 crore, while in the endorsement stakes, the super exclusive Aamir Khan charges more per brand (Rs 8-10 crore, which has gone up to Rs 12 crore for his new endorsement, Samsung).

Where Shah Rukh scores is in his ability to reinvent himself across different arenas, from the inspirational sports leader of Chak De! India to the man with the six pack abs in Om Shanti Om, from the teacher with the smarts in Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hain?

to the item boy in the sparkly holster of Krazzy 4 to the 12th man who is bigger than the Team XI—no matter who is playing, he is always the centre of attention. In the cult of Shah Rukh Khan, there is room for just one icon. “No one can get tired of me,” he says with his typical understatement.

Brand builder Anirban Das Blah, from a tribe Shah Rukh considers superfluous, puts it in corporate terms: “He is simply the biggest marketing phenomenon in the Indian entertainment industry as he straddles every area of it.” Does this straddling arise from a deep-seated insecurity or enormous self-belief? Even Shah Rukh’s often charming glibness would not have an answer.

He also scores over his contemporaries in his diaspora appeal. Of the top five Hindi box office grossers in the US, four are his films, garnering a collective revenue of $12.7 million (Rs 51 crore).

Last year, he made newspaper headlines in Germany by just showing up at the Berlin Film Festival, while in Paris’s Montmarte this week, he says— and “I don’t like to boast”—even his family was taken aback by the 1,000 people who had gathered there, a few even carrying the “Korbo, Lorbo, Jeetbo” banner.

But more than the 50 films in his oeuvre, his videsi appeal, and his eclectic interests (which range from reading Ayn Rand to watching Manchester United games), there is perhaps one element where he triumphs over others.

He is a great storyteller, the old fashioned village square kind who gathers the no-good fellows around him for a bit of a yarn. Sometimes the Khan ki kahani is about himself, part of the great folklore of struggle surrounding him— the middle-class Delhi boy who loses his parents young, comes alone to the big city of Mumbai, says to the sea he will own it one day, does so, his success as an outsider mirroring the rise of young, aspirational India.

It is a compelling story, repeated in at least two biographies and a two-part documentary, making him the most analysed among his contemporaries.

It’s a story that makes comparisons with the past a tad obsolete. As film scholar Nasreen Munni Kabir says: “It’s a whole new world. You can’t compare the stardom of Dilip Kumar or even Amitabh Bachchan with the 24-hour celebrity-guzzling machine that exists today.”

Shah Rukh’s storytelling is about others as well— friends and rivals alike—told mercilessly with dead-on mimickery, to a posse of pals stretching from recent entrant Arjun Rampal to the old faithful Karan Johar.

The home is ruled by a velvet glove, Gauri’s perma party gloss masking an utterly sensible woman who is as likely to scream at her son for not doing his homework as she is to twit her husband for putting his shoes on the table.

“Mehmannawazi” is intrinsic to her and evident even in the way her husband treats his team, hosting a party for them after every match, unmindful of whether they win or lose. “It is evident in the way”, says friend Farah Khan, “he will drive to town after a long day to make sure he attends the wedding of a Red Chillies staffer.”

“My father used to tell me, be gracious in victory and graceful in defeat,” says Shah Rukh, though it doesn’t stop him from getting into cheeky chatback contests, with an array of notables such as Amar Singh and Akshay Kumar.

Where will it all end? In an IPO, so that he can build his new dream, which could be a studio or a stadium? He doesn’t rule it out, looking at friends Dhoot and Mehta in the room.

“If these guys say so…” he trails off. Will he be able to sustain a movie career that is as versatile as his interests? If it worries him, he doesn’t show it.

“Because you know what, all that I know is that when I wake up at 10, put my make-up on, and go to work, I am still as jittery about what I’m doing as I was 20 years ago,” he says. That anxiety to excel is inscribed in his DNA. And it is one that matches a youthful India that worships success.

SRK's vital stats

* Rs 36 crore earnings from 36 episodes of Kya Aap Paanchvi Pass Se Tez Hain?

* Rs 75 crore annual earnings from 15 brand endorsements.

* $ 12.5 million earnings from first year of buying IPL team at an annual price of $15.5 m.

* Rs 150 net box office revenue of his 2007 releases Chak De! India and Om Shanti Om.