Skip to main content

The Evolution of 'A' Khan




As a young girl in 1988, I remember watching Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (QSQT) on video with a friend in her house in Chennai. Aamir Khan mesmerized us. We were schoolgirls in double pigtails. Life happened. I grew up. My tastes in men and heroes changed.

Christina Daniels, the author of "I'll do it my way: The Incredible Journey of Aamir Khan,” says in her epilogue, "On a cold dark night in a boarding school in Panchgani, a group of 12-year-old girls sat huddled under a dormitory bed. The year was 1988. A walkman was passed around, as the girls strained to listen to the song 'Papa Kehte Hain' from the film QSQT that had been released a couple of vacations ago. The name on all lips was Aamir Khan, the film's lead actor. The walkman soon found its way into the hands of the only teenager in the group completely oblivious to the QSQT frenzy that had gripped an entire generation. While the song played on, someone helpfully offered an accompanying line-by-line translation. As the lyrics formed meaning in my mind, I was hooked."

First published in 2012, Christina's book has since come out with a Turkish edition. It briefly captures the early years of Aamir Khan, and then delves into the 'behind-the-scenes' work on all his major films from QSQT until '3 idiots'. The author has done meticulous research and has quoted almost every resource available from the website rediff to The Guardian. But what makes this more than just a book with second-hand research featuring interviews with a few producers and directors is the way she has strung it all together, which makes for a narrative that flows well.

The Guardian compared Aamir to Errol Flynn in 2003. A director compares him to Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, and Marlon Brando. To know more, read the book.  It has come out with an updated edition in 2017, with a new cover and is available for free on Kindle Unlimited.

Talking about Aamir's childhood years, the author says Aamir read his first Enid Blyton when he was just six. Soon Alfred Hitchcock, Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, P.G. Wodehouse, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy followed.

Christina, who I know since 2013, has described Aamir Khan's dedication to his craft. She elaborates on how he learned various dialects for different roles, tried different looks, experimented with his physique to look a certain age for a part, his willpower, and so on with meticulous detail outlining the making of each film, how it was received, its critique and so on. She also talks about his different advertisements.

What I felt about the book is that it seems to be a hagiography of Aamir Khan. It doesn't point out anything negative or unsavory about him.


I recommend it to die-hard fans of Aamir Khan.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang - A Book Review

  This book has been on my TBR since the time it was featured in The New Yorker in 2019.  I bought the Kindle edition recently and read it over 2-3 days. The author Esmé Weijun Wang is an American writer who has written the novel, The Border of Paradise (2016) and The Collected Schizophrenias (2019). She has received the Whiting Award and was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta magazine.   Wang has been diagnosed with a slew of health issues: schizoaffective disorder— bipolar type, idiopathic peripheral neuropathy, fibromyalgia, complex PTSD, dysautonomia/POTS, chronic Lyme disease, and the extremely rare cotard’s delusion and capgras syndrome.   Wang calls her book “the collected schizophrenias” to include all the diseases that go into this basket, including schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia, and schizotypal personality disorder. Since she was into psychological research herself, her awareness about these matters ...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Book Review of 'Bitch Goddess for Dummies'

Recently, I attended a zoom session on chick lit by the Chennai Lockdown Literary Festival (CLLF). In the session, one of the speakers was Maya Sharma Sriram. I was so impressed with the way she conducted the session and answered the questions that I decided to pick up her chick lit novel, ‘Bitch Goddess for Dummies’ brought out by Rupa Publications in 2012. And I was not disappointed. I’m not sure if I was biased toward the book by the personality I had seen on zoom or not, but I quite enjoy chick lit and have read several chick lit novels in my thirties.   So the novel is about a 27-year-old woman Mira Iyer who decides to transform her personality from good girl to ‘bitch goddess’ to deal with the people in her life. Her mom who is constantly trying to fix her up with some eligible guy so that she can get married and Sanya, the real office bitch who is always cosying up to their bosses and vying for a promotion, are just two of the people in her life causing her angst. So it’s go...
3 comments
Read more

Ray Bradbury and Ma Perkins rule my heart

Ray Bradbury is a literary giant. I read one of his short stories recently. This prompted me to go looking for his book of short stories that I'd picked up years ago, which was languishing unread in my home library. The book cover tells me he is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer prize special citation, winner of the 2004 National medal of arts, and a couple of other literary honours. This collection of stories is called ' We'll always have Paris'. But this title story is not my favourite. This one is about two men. A married man who leaves his sleeping wife in the room and goes out for a walk, following another man who leads him through the streets of Paris only to kiss him goodbye. They don't understand each other's language. The way the story was told, I took this to mean he was gay and was checking if the married man was, too. But the married man who was charmed with this man decided he wasn't and went back to his sleeping wife, forgetting all about t...
Post a Comment
Read more