Anupam interviews the shy SRK

By Subhash K. Jha -

July 8, 2014 - 10:44 AM IST

Anupam Kher wears so many hats it's hard to remember he has no hair.

Now on Sunday night he emerged as a talk-show host, chatting it up with Shah Rukh Khan as only they could. After all they have played father and son N-number of times.

There was a straightforwardness about the chat, in opposition to the elaborate Gothic set with tall grotesque imposing pillars which seemed to mock the heartfelt utterances of the actor who defines romance in contemporary times.

Anupam let out that Shah Rukh is actually a shy guy. That's one revelation which is hard to believe. But then like it or not Kher wants to remind us, 'kuch bhi ho sakta hai.

A struggling actor from Delhi who had to sleep on the pavements of Mumbai suddenly signed 5 films in one day.

It's a stroke of luck, or call it a calculated serendipity, that Anupam could get Shah Rukh to kick off his show. This actor epitomizes fluency on talk show cameras. He chatters non-stop without ever lapsing into inanity.

In the kick-off episode Shah Rukh spoke mainly about his parents, about losing his father at age of 15 to cancer and his mother soon after. About praying outside the ICU while his mother breathed her last, thinking that she wouldn't pass away as long as he kept praying.

There was a note of innocence and vulnerability in the way Shah Rukh spilled his heart out. "I never wear pajamas to bed. I like to dress up for sleep. If I had my way I'd sleep in a suit," said Shah Rukh, prompting us to search his unrelenting face for traces of irony.

There is a directness to Kher's approach to his celebrity guests, as if by cutting through the accessorized trivia-tripe of the trippy talk show, Anupam is telling us that the way to reach the score of a star's personality is to let him talk uninterrupted by the anchor's wise cracks.

This, then, was the King Khan unplugged....trying to remain politically correct while speaking his heart out. Finally when Anupam playfully chided SRK for being guarded (this, when SRK wondered it is right to say he found his wife...ahem...physically attractive) the superstar threw all caution to the winds with the declarations, 'This is the way I am, and to hell with those who don't like it.'

Luckily for us there was very little to dislike in the iconic star. He came across very strongly as a family man who would readily sacrifice his superstardom for the sake of his wife and children.

"I get very lonely at night...I don't get much sleep," Shah Rukh confessed.

If this was ploy to win sympathy from his fans, it worked fully.

At a time when the talk shows are becoming dreadfully dehydrated and reality shows are getting desperately over-the-top, The Anupam Kher Show aims at a minimalist unadorned approach to celebrities, letting the guest speak without engineering anchoring bumps.