Megastar Shah Rukh Khan, who is attending the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, engaged in a discussion with the festival’s artistic director about the nature of stardom. Shah Rukh admitted he has never fully understood the concept of fame, saying that while he views stardom with a sense of detachment, he takes the love and adulation from his fans very seriously.
He said, “I’ve always never understood the stardom part of it. So, I come and I try and give joy. I fall. I somersault. I run. I fight. I sing. I romance. I become a bad guy. And then I try to give joy in whichever way I can. I’m like a monkey! I want to do anything that will give you joy. And then when people get joy, they like me back. And that liking becomes to adulation and adore me and love me. And say, ‘okay, this is nice. He gives us joy’. We have a life. All of them [fans] have a life. I have this life where I’m doing a job also. And they take time out from their jobs, from their life, sit down for two hours, get happiness and respond back to it by saying we love you. Stardom is just a circumstantial, consequential byproduct of this. It has nothing to do with me and them. That just is because you have to, like I said, compartmentalise everything,” he explained.
He mentioned that stardom is a separate entity for him, distinct from his work and the genuine love and respect he receives from his fans. “It has nothing to do with what I do and what they do. So I’ve never thought of stardom as anything important. Yes, I respect it a lot. It has given me a lot of recognition, love, monies. My family feels happy because of it. But beyond that, stardom is not something that I carry as the first thing when I walk into a room. For me, I’ve always said this. It’s an old thing I always felt. To me, I wear stardom like a T-shirt, not like a tuxedo. It’s not important,” he said.
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