When he sees elderly, idealistic-looking people in the audience, he himself says that he knows he is blamed as the symbol of decadent culture. I almost jumped with surprise when he said that in one of our IIPM shows, for those were the exact words I heard from my dad just a few hours before entering the venue. Later he laughed it off saying he knows that’s how parents often look at him. Actually that’s what sets him apart. While most stars in Bollywood wouldn’t have ever used the word decadence in their lifetime, SRK can use it upon himself and laugh.
But then don’t poke him. Apart from his polite and dignified ways and the fact that he is the only other genuine super star India has ever produced since Amitabh, there is no similarity between him and Big B. They belong to two different generations. “Waise toh dilliwala hoon aur logon ko ek mukka deke theek karna bhi aata hai,” Shah Rukh had said in jest another time, yet making a point during the launch of our book Thorns To Competition, and candidly admitting he still does. But he can’t, thanks to where he has reached. Or perhaps I should rephrase his words and say he tries his best not to. But truthfully, with the number of people trying to pull him down, I am sure at times he is human enough to lose it. But then he rarely does. For he knows how to hit back differently. He himself says that to hit back hard, he decided to change the game. He even took up bad-guy roles. He plays a game that others are not into, and changes the rules of the game. And that’s been his way to hit back this time to his detractors too. The IPL crown! Not at all a fluke. Very intelligently and passionately drawn up victory. Beginning with the choice of Wasim Akram as the bowling coach to the careful selection of the team, its captain to the calculated risk of angering Kolkata fans by dropping the completely finished Sourav Ganguly.
I’m the best! That’s one line he is known by and proudly proclaims at every given opportunity, and said to Kolkata fans too: “I am the god of my team.” He is unabashed about the things he does, for he does things from his heart and with passion. And he does good things. He has no pretense to be a social change agent. When people questioned him on why he even wanted to be in the film industry, his response always used to be, “To make people smile.” His premise has always been clear—he is an entertainer. When they asked him why he wanted to be a filmstar, he said, “I want to be a filmstar for my late parents... I want to make movies so damned bloody big that my parents, somewhere up in heaven, can sit on some star and see my movies from there too, and say, ‘Hey, we can see his movies from here better than we can see the Great Wall of China... We can see his movies covering the face of this earth’...” His grandmother used to tell him that every time a camera flashed, it took away a minute of one’s life—Shah Rukh confessed that his obsession with movies was such that he would rather have so many cameras flashing at him that his life ended in a second’s time (this, incidentally, is also the last line of his yet-to-be finished autobiography). That’s how he wants to go... giving the last shot for a film. No one says this. They call it decadent culture. He proudly symbolises it and inspires a whole generation.
But what we must not mistake is his spirit and call it arrogance. At no point has he gotten so arrogant as to think that he will never fail. In his foreword for one of my previous books, Discover The Diamond In You, he wrote an oft forgotten but most meaningful quote, “Success is never final, and failure never fatal.” That’s perhaps the key attitude that makes a winner. He also wrote, “Failure is an amazing teacher... In my life, it’s not success that I want as much as I want not to fail.” He is one man who keeps learning from all his failures and keeps moving ahead. That’s how he won the IPL this year after being mocked four times in past—more than the others who didn’t win were. Instead of banning him from stadiums, we might as well do better learning from him one thing. Winners never quit and quitters never win. Keep rocking SRK.
The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own
Chaudhuri is a management guru and honorary director at IIPM Think Tank