Saturday Small Talk: Chat Away While I Sleep Off a Late Night

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Happy Saturday! I’m still recovering from my up-all-night night with Shahrukh, so I’ll be taking it easy today. I’ll still try to get that Billu review I promised up and out, so at least you will have that. And of course the daily SRK post.

Things to talk about! First a bit of blog business, I’ve updated the “DCIB House Rules” post to include rules for comments. You already know them, first being “please put general comments on the Monday, Wednesday, or Saturday posts instead of throwing them on unrelated posts”. Second, don’t use hate speech or abusive language (no duh, and none of you do it anyway, but good to make it official). And third, no politics, nothing about depressing horrible problems of the world that just sends us all into a cycle of agreeing that it is all going to hell in a handbasket, that does nothing but depress me.

Now, things to discuss! The Letterman episode, obviously. Hop over to my insanely detailed review to discuss it. And let me know if it is popping up on your “trending” or “recommended” lists, I’m curious how much Netflix is going to promote this thing.

Huh. This is only on the Netflix India youtube channel, not the regular Netflix channel

Dabangg 3 trailer! Somehow I never got around to an official post so I am throwing it in here. What do we think?

Diwali! How are we all celebrating? Or not celebrating? Myself, I’ll be not-celebrating and having a regular Sunday, as fireworks go off all around my apartment. Another fun discussion topic, what is your favorite Diwali film song? Myself, I go for “Happy Diwali”.

And, of course, any other random thing you want to bring up today, cute news story, new movie rumors, trailer I missed, and so on.

47 thoughts on “Saturday Small Talk: Chat Away While I Sleep Off a Late Night”

  1. There will be three Indian movies about baldness/hair loss next month, two Hindi one (comedies) and a Bengali one (drama).
    Did you get wind of the controversy between the two Hindi movies (Bala with Ayushmann & Ujda Chaman with Sunny Singh, latter officially based on the Kannada movie Ondu Motteya Kathe)?
    News are now that Ujda Chaman has been preponed from 8th of November to 1st of November after Bala had been preponed from 22nd of November to 7th of November after the trailer of Ujda Chaman was out in early October giving a date before Bala.
    Already during the shooting the makers of Ujda Chaman had accused the Bala makers (and also Ayushmann) of plagiarizing.

    Whish you a speady “recovery” 🙂 … and I’ll try to give up my ranting and raving 😉

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  2. What did your up-all-night with SRK contain? Am I being too nosy?

    I have a question for you: Do you have any ideas where I could find out more about SRK’s anxiety issues? He usually seems to just label all that under “shyness”, but some of the issues he has mentioned having seem to suggest bigger issues. I am talking about stuff like not being able to buy stuff, not being able to stand in line at an airport, not knowing how to ask for food when he is hungry, not knowing how to ask for his size when in need of new clothes, extreme shyness with women, and probably dozens of references I don’t know about.

    Anyway, do you (or anyone) know where I can find more elaborate information on this? Did anyone ever ask him more in-depth what is going on?

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    • My “up all night” was your “during the day”. The Letterman interview dropped at 2am my time, I set my alarm to wake me up at 1:30, watched it immediately and then wrote my review, which meant I was up from 1:30am until forever. Went straight from finishing the review to work, than to a party after work, than home and slept for 9 hours after being awake for 21 hours straight.

      I hadn’t put together Shahrukh’s issues as anxiety until you put them all together like that! Yes, that makes complete sense. I can’t remember hearing or reading anything that discussed them as connected, beyond general discussion from him of how he doesn’t feel like he has anyone of his own in the world (thus the discomfort with asking for things since he feels like he has no one who he has a right to ask for things as his family is all gone). Of course, I am far from having read or heard everything that has ever been said about him, I’ll be interested to learn if anyone else has run across such a thing.

      On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 10:46 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

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      • He also told that being a small kid, he hided under the bed when people came into the house and had to be convinced to join the others.
        When MNIK was in Berlin for the filmfestival, I did interviews with people involved. I asked one if my feeling that ShahRukh has slightly autistic thraits is right and got an answer in the affirmative. There are moments when he is like a kid or a student who wants to do the things rightly…in certain situations he definitely would be lost without a ‘guide’. That’s why Pooja is with him when Gauri isn’t … those closely around him (Pooja, Ravi and his man-friday are nice people but highly protective).

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        • Yeah, I would not be surprised if if he was on the spectrum. Sometimes you will notice him doing odd things. He had mentioned his father would sometimes forget to wear his shoes and leave the house. I saw him doing the same thing! He had attended an Ambani party – it was a religious function so you have to remove your shoes. SRK ran out of the party without his shoes and all the photographers were confused why he’s not wearing shoes and what he’s doing. Then he rushes back out of his car to get his shoes. It was cute and funny but the kind of thing I might expect from someone slightly autistic.

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          • There is a reference to his father in KKHH, when he is about to leave the house without trousers on. (He once told about his father being distracted like that.)

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  3. Oh, right. I was having a brain-dead moment! 21 hours is SRK territory work commitment for sure. I’ll say it was worth it. =D

    Right! I forgot about those comments he made about not being able to sleep alone, like when nobody is home he will take the dog to bed instead so as to have company and not feel as alone.

    I have two more. 1 is him fearing someone might cut his arms while he is stretching them.

    The other is when Karan said during a BBC get-together where they (Karan, Kajol, SRK) promote My Name is Khan, that there’s a lot of SRK in Rizvan, that a lot of the mannerisms shown by Rizvan are SRK’s. Kajol confirmed later that, of all the characters he’s played, Rizvan comes closest. And I love how SRK disagreed by saying it was Don he was most alike.

    That would make for an interesting article… All his strange quirks / mannerisms or things that are typically SRK like the phrase he uses in every interview, “I tell this to everyone”, or him pressing down his cheeks with his forefinger in almost every single interview as well.

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    • Interesting chicken and egg question here with what you bring up: did the anxiety lead to his stardom (the need to be loved, to not be alone, to feel secure)? Or did his stardom lead to the anxiety (always being watched, people always wanting something from him)?

      Personally, I think it’s combined, he already had various regular issues with his being orphaned and wanting love and so on, and then when he reached stardom and had all these people around him all the time it must have just put it all through the roof for him. Little random fears like his arms being cut off suddenly expanded and increased with long work hours and constant cameras on him and seeing his face everywhere. I mean really, if I was asked to live Shahrukh’s life, I think it would drive me mad. It would have to drive any “normal” person mad, and even an abnormal person like Shahrukh must be driven a little bit mad by it.

      On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 11:07 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

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      • In terms of the chicken and egg question; I haven’t a clue. He does strike me as completely and utterly bonkers though. And not just now, either but in his very first projects as well. Whether that insanity is through intrinsic disposition or extrinsic influences, impossible to tell.

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        • Professionelly he is everything he isn’t privately except the charming and humerous part…even being with colleagues – once with them – he is kind of the “sunny boy”, but during the shooting, he can also retire into himself with all the bustle around him. However, he would not need them in his private time…When he doesn’t shoot and isn’t outside with colleagues (who have to ‘drag’ him sometimes out of the room) with something to do together, he spends all his time in the hotel suite (but there will always be at least one person with/near him, mostly his little ‘man-Friday’). What I found very surprising is, that his suite doesn’t smell the smoke despite all the ciggies (neither does the man), it smells of him.
          There are many things he says in interviews which are just for taking others for a ride (stating that he sees himself more as Don is not thaaaat farfetched, I think he doesn’t see Rizwan as close to him as others, only some traits of him which he basically doesn’t live a lot of times).

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          • I’ve always wondered about the smell thing. Every single person that has met him says he smells really good which is something I never understood. How can a heavy smoker smell good? But every single person says it. Even his coworkers. I remember Mahira Khan saying that SRK smells so good that she wanted to ask him how and what he’s using but she was too embarrassed to. Finally on the last day of shoot, she tracked down Pooja and asked her what cologne he’s wearing that he smells like that.

            I still don’t get it. How do you mask that smoke smell?

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          • Have you heard the stories of how he spends hours in the bathroom? He must have some mysterious routine that fixes it!

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          • Yeah, he does take others for a ride so it’s hard to know what is real and what is fake. I think he gives enough that you can pick out the pieces you like and discard the ones you don’t. Maybe that’s why he’s so loved. Everyone can make him what they want to and get their own version of him.

            This is the guy that faked a seizure in school, complete with shaking and foaming at the mouth, convinced his teacher they needed his shoes to stop the seizure, and then used that as a way to get out of class. So he knows how to mess around.

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  4. The second time I opened Netflix within the last 24 hours, one of those big video promos for the Letterman special started playing up at the top. Does that have to do with what you watch though? I’ve watched a lot of SRK on Netflix, so the algorithm might already be tailored to advertise it to me because it knows I’ll watch it.

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  5. Also, KANK is broadcast on TV just now! Wooot! Going to watch it! I like the film for what it is. It’s perfect for the Autumn season!

    I somehow managed to hurt my eye, so now I have only one eye to watch SRK. That’s a bummer but a one-eye-SRK viewing is better than none at all. heh.

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  6. Confession time: I feel I shouldn’t because I don’t like Athiya Shetty but I really liked Motichoor Chaknachoor trailer and I think I will watch this movie when it will be available.
    I saw the poster first and I liked it a lot, because it’s so rom-com and colorful, but I noticed Athiya and decided it’ll be bad. Now I watched the trailer, it looks funny and Athiya is not terrible. I would never cast her opposite Nawazuddin Siddiqui (really such a odd casting) but maybe they will make it work? What do you think?

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    • How interesting! Similar plot to that Punjabi movie that just came out. Just like the three balding movies, the idea is just in the air.

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  8. I saw Kapoor and Sons today and wow, what an unsettling film. I thought it was a great flawed film, like it didn’t ever resolve a lot of tonal problems and the ending did not feel at all earned (except the father totally deserved that truck, the asshole) but I’m still glad I watched it. Fawad Khan was phenomenal in it. Even with the rest of the talent in that cast he was the standout.

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    • Wasn’t Fawad amazing? the little moments of heartbreak and disappointment were so well done.

      And yeah, an odd film. They definitely rushed the ending because there was no good ending available so they just pulled something random together. Sid does a better job than I expected, Alia was miss-cast (I thought), too young for the part. The whole Sid-Alia plot could really have been cut in order to make it more about Fawad and his parents and maybe Sid floating in and out. Maybe if Sid had a girlfriend back home that we saw in cameo just long enough for her to express that she feels like he’s holding back somehow, doesn’t trust her. And then at the end we see him bringing her back home with him and them being happier together. Same message that Sid’s inferiority complex is messing up everything in his life but without trying to throw a whole love story into the film along with everything else.

      On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 10:27 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

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  9. Random thought; I think it’s interesting that the majority of celebrities—when invited to a show—will inflate and sensationalize their personal stories and anecdotes for maximum effect and to sound intriguing and extraordinary. SRK does the exact opposite; he seems to deflate his stories and makes them sound a lot less dramatic than they actually are. And it’s other people who were witnesses at the time of xy event that fill in the details that are a lot less harmless or casual than he made them out to be. To me this ties in with the observation that he tries very hard to seem average, relatable, and kind of vanilla and then his circle of colleagues and friends chime in and tell the same story kind of exposing him by pretty much revealing how things actually went down by adding all the bits he left out.

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    • That is a very interesting random thought!!!!

      And it’s not limited to Shahrukh. Most of the older generation of Hindi film actors (I think) have life stories that are far more dramatic and amazing than anything an English speaking audience would be used to. Shahrukh’s rival Salman has an adopted younger sister who was a street child that his father found outside their gate and brought home. Aamir Khan had a similar love marriage to Shahrukh’s, elopement in the face of opposition and all that. Those are just the first stories that occur to me, both of them have many many more stories that are the equivalent to the ones Shahrukh tells. I think that whitewashing and making it “normal” isn’t limited to Shahrukh, there is a balance of trying to make the film industry seem like a representative of a happy clean successful India which means you can’t always acknowledge the shadows that are present. Gangsters, childhood disease and disasters, fighting for the right to love, all the things that you only see in movies in a fake fantasy way, or are erased.

      On Sun, Oct 27, 2019 at 9:50 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

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      • Yes, but that wasn’t what I was trying to say. I meant that many Western celebrities love to tell stuff to make them sound interesting or intriguing so they embellish their story with a lot of fake fluff so as to not sound like the average Joe. And I loved how SRK jokingly used that exact stylistic device in the Letterman interview when he added the Baywatch imagery and then laughed and said that part never happened. But, while
        exaggerated, that’s exactly a what most do.

        I didn’t feel like SRK was thinking of how the industry came across when he told his stories, especially given that he’s an outsider. My hunch is that it’s a personal
        choice to downplay his personal struggles and idiosyncrasies. But that’s my impression as a complete
        novice. I’m most likely wrong.

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        • I agree SRK in particular has a habit of skipping over things to make himself seem “normal”, especially in his recent interviews and in his western interviews.

          But you have sent me down a new line of thinking with your comparison with Western stars. I’m used to that from the West as well, ultimately shallow and selfish people making up lies to seem smart. It seems like the way Hollywood in particular is structured invites that kind of behavior and those kind of people. I don’t think they are bad people, just folks who like to tell stories and usually were born to more privilege than they acknowledge.

          I’ve run across similar commentary about Hindi film stars, that they are all spoiled rich people making up stories. But it’s not true, especially not for the older generation. There must be something different about the industry that requires a harsher background but I can’t sort out just what it is. And there also must be some mechanism which is teaching the upper middle-class urban educated types to dismiss movie stars as spoiled whiners making up stories. I can’t put it all together in my mind right now, but I know it is there. Even on some of my older posts, I have comments talking about how Shahrukh’s childhood wasn’t hard but privileged and he is putting on a pretense, and there were other comments about other stars. Maybe contamination from Hollywood coverage? Assumption that all movie stars follow the western pattern? Or just a new way of dismissing the Indian actors? I don’t know.

          On Sun, Oct 27, 2019 at 6:51 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:

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          • Everyone wants to find the chink in the armor. I have seen it so often now with all celebrities.

            For instance, celebrities can’t have a happy marriage. It has to be a PR image, they must be cheating secretly, they are just friends and never really see each other because they’re traveling, it’s a fake relationship, etc. (See, our boring marriage is much better than theirs.)

            They and their children are automatically stupid. They are all dropouts, can never be in a rigorous profession, etc. If they get into college, it must be paid with donations. They have used their contacts and connections. People jump on the smallest things like typos to prove how dumb they are. Ananya Pandey was widely mocked for accidentally writing “angles” instead of “angels” on twitter even though she wrote it correctly on instagram. (See, our office jobs and degrees mean we are much smarter than them)

            Celebrities being so visible, especially due to social media, and living grand lives is causing people to find ways to prove that they aren’t really all that great and our mediocre lives are actually better. I get where it comes from but people have developed such a superiority complex.

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        • I have seen the narrative change from the 90s to now as far as SRK is concerned. Since he was new and young and brash, he used to just blurt out anything. It was a much more raw version of him. Like Gauri’s parents weren’t just “conservative,” her mother literally took a bottle of pills and tried to commit suicide upon finding out her daughter wanted to marry a Muslim guy. Or how blatantly he used to call himself an atheist and that he did not believe in God. He’s gone as far as ranting about how his Muslim friends had told him to go take his kids to see animal sacrifice (for Bakri Eid) and how there’s no way he will ever do such a thing because he doesn’t believe in animals being killed and doesn’t understand why God would even want such a thing. Accidentally blurting out something like that now would literally cause storms of controversy and protests.

          He used to talk more about his sister and her issues but he’s completely stopped now. New fans would probably just have a blurry idea that he has a sister but nothing more. Nowadays he doesn’t even talk about his businesses. Even when he promotes one of his productions, he diminishes himself. When he made promo videos for Bard of Blood, he presented himself as a goofy idiot that doesn’t know what he’s doing and needs Emraan Hasmi to school him. (I know a lot of fans were angry about the videos)

          I think he’s reached a point where he’s too much of an icon to really say what he wants. He has to play down whatever he feels or thinks to remain palatable for the majority of people. The “everyman” thing is the easiest to work with. He doesn’t want to stand out in any way whatsoever.

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          • I’m shocked about some of the things you mentioned. An overdose of meds? Wow. That really saddens me.

            I did catch him talking about his older sister so I have a vague idea that she never got over the tragedies / loss to this day, is still unwell, that she is highly educated and lives with them.

            I’m surprised that fans got angry over the BoB trailer. I thought it was funny. Yeah, he played a fool but that’s nothing new? I liked that approach as opposed to something more serious and self import.

            I did notice that he was a lot more cocky in his responses in the 90s and early 2ks but then he was a lot younger too.

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          • The story that sticks in my mind is Gauri’s brother threatening him with a gun. And they weren’t a conservative family, her parents had a love marriage, their daughter went to college and played around all over the city without supervision (the reason she was able to have a secret boyfriend to begin with). But can you imagine the shock? Learning that your 20 year old daughter has had a serious boyfriend since she was 14 and you didn’t know about it? And that the boyfriend is an unemployed actor, an orphan with no family, and Muslim. Part of the story, to me, is that Shahrukh and Gauri must have known the first reactions would be extreme and were prepared and just stuck it out and waited and trusted that her family would come around. Which of course they did, once they realized the couple was truly in love and Shahrukh would be a good husband (despite his deficiencies on paper).

            His older sister has clinical depression, to the point that she cannot care for herself. It came when she was 19 after the death of their father, she finished school and lived on her own for a while after Shahrukh and Gauri were married (his mother was dead and he and Gauri were living in one room, so she must have been independent), but it must have progressed because now she lives with Shahrukh and Gauri and does not work. He doesn’t lie about it or hide it exactly, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. Your vague impression is I think the one he prefers to give, she is unwell and lives with them.

            Age changes so much. For instance, his answers about being an atheist, I am sure he made a decision not to repeat those stories any more, but I also believe that over the past 25 years he could easily have moved from being an atheist to being a believer in some version of a higher power. Or redefining his beliefs and realizing that they do allow for a higher power after all.

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