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Journalism of Courage
My earliest memory of watching Shah Rukh Khan is when I was four. My sister, who ardently loved SRK, had put on Om Shanti Om one evening, it was a blur of excitement and curiosity. I don’t think I really understood the nuances of parody or nostalgia, but I do remember the energy. The songs, the dance, the smiles and the tears. For days after, I would flip through film magazines, cut out pictures of him and paste them into a messy collage onto a notebook. Somewhere between the glue stains and newsprint, Shah Rukh Khan became my first version of what stardom meant.
It’s 2025 and the idea of a “superstar” feels almost outdated. Our screens are flooded with influencers, content creators and endless algorithm-fed personalities. Stardom today is about proximity, about someone who feels ‘relatable’. But Shah Rukh Khan has always had this larger-than-life aura, which is beyond the algorithms and reliability factors, but despite that he somehow still feels intimately ours. And that contradiction — that impossible balance between distance and familiarity — is why Gen Z continues to love him.
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We grew up in a time when Bollywood’s emotional excess was being replaced by minimalism. The heroes who followed after SRK were quieter, more restrained and often too ‘real’. But Shah Rukh never pretended to be subtle. His grand declarations of love, his arms stretched out, his long monologues were all theatre, and maybe that’s what we craved but didn’t know we did. In a world obsessed with irony, SRK’s sincerity felt radical.
Even now, when Gen Z is often accused of detachment, we find comfort in someone who believes so unapologetically in love and drama. It’s not nostalgia but identification. His characters were never perfect men; they were conflicted, awkward, even insecure. Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa’s Sunil was a loser in love before being a loser in love became cinematic currency. Kal Ho Naa Ho’s Aman made kindness and spreading love look cool. And Om Shanti Om’s Om was literally reborn from failure. Each one of them embodied a strange optimism, the kind that insists you’ll get your moment, even if it takes another lifetime.
And then there’s the off-screen SRK – the one who quotes Kabir , who folds humour into humility, who manages to laugh at himself, his flaws and shortcomings and the circumstances without taking himself too seriously. He has aged, yes, but gracefully, like someone who’s made peace with his contradictions. In interviews, he talks about fame as both a gift and a burden. He doesn’t lecture; he reflects.
When Pathaan (2023) and Jawan (2023) hit theatres, most of us were old enough to know that the world had changed. Yet, walking into packed halls, hooting for King Khan with people we’d never met, but with whom we share the same love, we felt something collective again. It wasn’t just his comeback. It was his homecoming.
There’s also something quietly revolutionary about the way he’s redefined masculinity. Long before it became a hashtagged conversation, Shah Rukh showed men could cry, be soft and still be magnetic. His charm, his romance became a vocabulary on its own. He flirted, but he listened. In a cinematic landscape that is now interrogating its past gaze, his legacy, even though it has its own problematic characters, stands out.
Perhaps, that’s why even for those of us born after his ‘peak’ he still represents aspiration. Not just the fame or the romance but the persistence. The man who came to Mumbai with some money and built himself into mythology remains the ultimate underdog story. For a generation struggling with uncertainty, self-doubt and the exhaustion of endless reinvention, his journey feels deeply reassuring. It is optimistic.
At 60, SRK doesn’t need to chase relevance because he has never stopped evolving. From Rahul to Raees, from Raj to Pathaan, every era finds its own version of him. And somehow, even in this age of short attention spans, he continues to make us wait, to feel, to believe in the slow burn of charisma.
