Shah Rukh Khan had initially resisted playing the lead in Aditya Chopra’s “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge”, the 1995 mega hit that created his screen persona of a yuppie romantic hero, says film critic Anupama Chopra in her biography on the Bollywood superstar.

The actor enjoys stardom, but gets creative satisfaction from playing diverse, unconventional roles, Chopra says in “King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema” that was launched in New York last week.

She says that “Darr” led him to the Yash Chopra-Karan Johar camp. “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” and “Dil To Paagal Hai” built upon the “Dilwale…” persona. Read the rest of this entry »

By Faridoon Shahryar, IndiaFM

Shahrukh Khan is the proverbial outsider who has made it Huge in the big and complex world of Hindi Films. In spite of being pitched against three generation of superstars he continues to lord over the Box Office. It was apt for Author/ Journalist Anupama Chopra to choose him as the pivotal character in her brilliant book King of Bollywood Shahrukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema (Warner Books) where she chronicles the growth of Hindi Films industry (popularly known as Bollywood) from a disorganized murky business to corporate sophistication through the life and times of one of its biggest stars Shahrukh Khan.

The interesting part about this book is that it effortlessly meshes together the happenings in the film world with the socio-political and economic changes in the country. SRK has been presented as the symbol of a new modern India in the era of globalization that is hungry for success and yet remains glued to the ground realities of family-n-friendships. The class-divide, the cultural upheavals, the gradual shift from poverty to relative affluence has been wonderfully conjoined with the growth of SRK, the struggling actor who got a three scene obsolete role in Pradip Kishan’s In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, becomes nation’s rage with his first TV serial Fauji, enters films and becomes the biggest draw at the ticket window. Read the rest of this entry »