Book Review
Title: King of Bollywood – Sharukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema.
Author: Anupama Chopra
Rating: ***
Book Genre: Non-Fiction/Pop Culture
Price: $24.99/U.S.
King of Bollywood…… may be a good book for Shahrukh Khan Fans wanting to know more about him, but the book is not all about him! The author has a lot more to pen about, focusing not just the life and rise of Shahrukh Khan as a phenomenon, but also on evolution of Bollywood, film making, films, and image of Bollywood, Bollywood dreams, audience psychosis and even boom of Indian economy!
The book traces the life and dreams, realities, fears, and even rumors of Shahrukh Khan. Born and brought up in a middle class Muslim family of Meer and Fatima in Delhi, his family roots are tracked to pre partitioned Pakistan. The book unveils details about his father and his death due to cancer, his mother’s daily struggles, but belief in Shahrukh’s good future, his college days, early acting in theatre, his mother’s death, and his stint in television and launch in movies. The actor’s ‘filmi’ style love affair with Gauri and married life in the film industry, his unconventional roles in many movies, his successes and failures, his production ventures, his competition, his diplomatic stance under mafia terror, his endorsements and brand image, all are talked about in relation to the film industry.
The author Anupama Chopra, a film critic and journalist, married to director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, sister of director Tanuja Chandra and author Vikram Chandra, and daughter of scriptwriter Kamna Chandra, has written two other books, including the British Film Institute-published Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge ("The Bravehearted Will Take the Bride"), which incidentally is what inspired her to work on the story of Shah Rukh Khan.
Here in this book, Chopra subtly says that Shahrukh may not have been the best actor of his period, but is a superstar more for his charisma than craft! She writes about how young directors like Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar shaped the new romantic hero and marketed the fantasy that shaped Shahrukh’s success. She also brings out the character traits of SRK’s persona of being a mercurial, spirited extrovert who seeks what he wants with energetic passion, but at the same time he is a very private person who internalizes his failures and disappointments. This also justifies what his wife Gauri says there are two Shahrukhs: Shahrukh One and Shahrukh Two. “One is saying one thing; the other is saying the complete opposite, and both in the space of a minute.”
The book is technically not a biography of Sharukh Khan as it has few direct interviews with Shahrukh Khan and hence lacks personal anecdotes and intimate details of SRK. Chopra focuses more on Bollywood and its growth and relates it to the reigning superstar of Bollywood! Her documentation of events and introduction and evolution of Bollywood is also very prosaic and colorless. She seemed to have crammed the content of many a film interview of her journalistic career into this book. The book doesn’t personify the flamboyant SRK; it even begins very uninterestingly, with an anecdote of fan in Georgia. The book leaves you disillusioned with the title ‘King of Bollywood Sharukh Khan’. It’s all about the subtitle ‘the seductive world of Indian cinema’.
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