Prathyush Parasuraman
a notorious presence in his own right, is to milk both his nostalgic reverence for her cinema and her son’s kind irreverence towards those very things. This tension bodes well, because the tone is never allowed to sink into one or the other.
With words like “gusto”, “amalgamation”, fringed with elocution-school-boy energy, makes you wonder, if you are doing a talk show the least one could expect is the pretension of talk, not speech.
Khan, who has been on the couch with his sister, his daughter, his wife, and now, his mother, doesn’t fall too far from this tree. “Moody, mildly … narcissistic,” he says, describing both how he and his mother are cut from the same cloth.
Tagore calls her love for Khan “putra moha”, and Khan and Johar both run circles trying to figure out what that means. Tagore gives up. Here are two titans of Hindi cinema for whom Hindi is a formality, an aesthetic.
There is no desire to milk his mistakes into morals, and neither is there a pompous arrogance over that past, fetishising it into a life lived beyond the imagination. Johar keeps trying to reduce him to a type, his life to a journey, and Khan keeps trying to wriggle out of it.
It is sweet, cute and easy when people wear themselves so lightly on their shoulders, neither prone to embarrassment, nor regret, nor a heavy feeling of compensating for what one is and what one is not.