Opinion Koffee with a new, vulnerable Karan

Johar, at the centre of Bollywood, with his 25-year career as a director and then a producer (who among us can call Shah Rukh Khan our closest friend?), could prod his guests about the “conjecture” surrounding their lives and the “equations” with contemporaries in a cutthroat industry.

He would ease them in (again, most seemed like friends) like he was having a conversation with them at a party he was hosting. The fun lay in knowing intimate details about our favourite stars’ lives. The tone was always irreverent. There was the occasional question about the failure of an actor’s film, but it was not bothered with digging deeper.

Then came the big thud: The nepotism conversation, which actor Kangana Ranaut sparked off in an episode of the show, alongside Saif Ali Khan. Ranaut seemed to have taken on the clique that was Bollywood, questioning Johar, who is known for working with his friends and their kids, on his own show.

The debate assumed a new shape following the death by suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput in 2020. It became weaponised to target certain Bollywood celebrities, chief among them Johar, who was also attacked for his sexuality.

This was followed by a two-year lull that Bollywood collectively felt. It was starved of scripts and stars; the inventive and earnest filmmaking from the South looked more grounded in comparison to the artifice of Bollywood. Johar’s mainstream aesthetic was also criticised for its lack of originality, part of the problem with the storytelling of the Hindi film industry.

A Koffee season went by in the middle of all of this, in 2022. Many fans of the show would consider it the show’s worst season ever. The actors were too trained in manufactured PR-speak and the 50-year-old Johar, a little too invested in the sex lives of his younger colleagues. Many called it creepy, and the season was almost universally panned for being dull.

Within a year arrives season eight, the gloss of the set intact, and the effervescence and sheen of the stars even more so. This is in part because of the re-energised Bollywood landscape following the success of Pathaan, Johar’s own Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, Gadar 2 and Jawan. The guests, Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh, together starred in two of these films. Johar introduced them as Bollywood “royalty”.

We wait for it to take a gossipy turn — the “candid” rapid fire, where Johar asks his guests to rank actors based on their acting skills and sex appeal — and the games. It never does.

Instead, we get Johar’s self-deprecating take on his fashion, a symptom, he says, of his “mid-life” crisis.

For the first time, Padukone and Singh share footage from their 2018 wedding in a stunning villa at Lake Como in Italy.

After this was the show’s most vulnerable moment, with a visibly emotional Johar speaking about being alone: “Every day I wake up and a little part of me feels that vacuum. I felt so happy for you but I felt so alone yet.”

Is it this self-reflection that has also, perhaps, helped Johar bring life to the hackneyed tropes of Hindi masala films? In his latest directorial endeavour Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, Johar addresses societal expectations of masculinity through a Kathak-teaching father. He gets Singh to dance to ‘Dola Re Dola’ with full abandon and also manages to give a lecture about the shame surrounding buying lingerie. All this while keeping the big, brimming and musical soul of Hindi films intact.

He showcased a similar vulnerability in a recent show, where he spoke of his sexuality: “The feminine side that I had, that was coming out so strongly, was only met with laughter… and then when I grew a little older, people got a little more quieter about it. But I could tell that there was a chitter-chatter about the way… I walked or spoke…”

The new episode also devotes a significant chunk of its runtime to discussing mental health, with Johar asking Padukone about her struggle with depression and anxiety. She speaks of her experiences and The Live Love Laugh Foundation, her initiative to create awareness about mental health. Singh leans in, listens. Does not interrupt. She says he creates a “safe space” for her, and Johar follows with a confidence of his own, when he speaks about a panic attack he had earlier this year that got him to seek professional help and get on medication.

As one of the most visible and mainstream Bollywood celebrities, Johar’s honesty, his ability to reveal himself with candour and also take a joke, is refreshing.

vidhatri.rao@expressindia.com