Shahrukh Khan becoming the 'cameo' king

Isn’t it a pity that one of the superstars of Bollywood was seen more in cameo appearances than leading roles in 2008?

After the release of his home production Om Shanti Om last year, Shahrukh Khan had officially declared himself “unemployed”. At that time he had no projects in hand. So he lapped up a few cameo appearances in movies by directors or producers who were “friends”.

Director Vivek Sharma made SRK play a forgettable role in Bhoothnath while Amitabh Bachchan hogged the limelight. SRK showed his quicksilver dance steps for a song in Krazzy 4 but the movie left the viewers with dumb heads. Producer Vivek Vaswani, a good friend of SRK, extended the actor’s cameo in Dulha Mil Gaya to a second fiddle role and got the movie stuck after SRK refused give more than a few days for the shoot.

Only cameos kept SRK busy until Aditya Chopra knocked on his door and offered him Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi , which has already hit the theatres and is doing fine at the box office.

So in a whole year of 52 Fridays, only one Friday saw SRK playing a full-fledged role, while the likes of Salman Khan and Saif Ali Khan had good number of releases with only a few doing well.

From the way things are looking, it appears that 2009 won’t be much different for SRK.

The first to hit the theatres would be Billu Barber , which is essentially an Irrfan Khan film with SRK having a screen time that’s more than a cameo but a lot less than the leading man’s. ‘Dulha Mil Gaya’, which has been in the making for God knows how long, will finally hit the theatres. And SRK will also do a cameo in Vivek Sharma’s next movie Kal Kisne Dekha which is essentially a launchpad of Jacky Bhagnani (son of producer Vashu Bhagnani) and Vaishali Desai (granddaughter of Manmohan Desai).

The only film that will see SRK in lead role would be Karan Johar’s My Name Is Khan in which he plays a man suffering from a milder form of autism. Unless some other director comes up with a script that catches SRK’s fancy, that’s all we may see of SRK on the big screen next year.

Ain’t that a pity? King Khan reduced to a ‘cameo’ king.