“SRK – The Acronym For Still Reading Khan” – Koimoi Reader’s View

I have heard many different acronyms of SRK over my life – Super Rocking Khan, Supremely Rated Khan and the list is endless. But the one that personally appeals to me the most is the one given by Mushtaq Sheikh, Still Reading Khan. Yes, he is still reading and is still a student. A student of films, a student of stardom and a self proclaimed student of money.

There is nothing wrong in having a craze for money. Everybody desires it, everybody dreams to sleep with it and everybody wills to sacrifice to some extent for it. So, SRK is no different. After all, he is a mere mortal. But then, if money is given such a huge aspirational value, it obviously means it doesn’t come the easy way. There are some who are lucky to have a rich father, there are some who are lucky to be born with a silver spoon in the mouth or there are some who are extremely lucky to get showered with a trainload of dowry. Unfortunately SRK couldn’t belong to any of these privileged groups. He was only lucky enough to be gifted with a pair of hands, legs, ears, eyes and a brain about the size of a normal human being.

So, what does a man with no paranormal gifts do? He had no oil wells to drill nor any cement plants inherited. The only thing which he had was a heart full of hope and a head full of dreams. A hope that pockets will take care of themselves and a dream to rule the City of Dreams, Mumbai.

So he decided to sell himself to the public. God was kind enough to give him a good persona and a pair of dimples and the man decided to make a fortune out of it. He laughed, he cried, he danced, he sang in the hope that people will buy the product called SRK. Unlike other products, this product along with the machine which produced it, was embedded in one another. Right from the raw material to the final product to the seller, each and every activity was a definition of one single man. And people embraced him with open arms.

People readily willed to sit in a dark room for three hours and cry with him. After repeatedly getting punched by Sunny Deol in Darr, he still managed to pull off a rare case. He made the audience fall in love with a villian rather than a hero. He made women cry for a villian rather than feeling proud about the hero. And he knew that SRK had arrived. He knew that the product will rule the market share for the years to come.

Unfortunately though, the machine was a human one. And then came the realization that the life of this human machine is limited. And there were quite a few promises to be kept. A promise to lead a king’s life and a promise to give the wife and children all the happiness in the world. It was then that the machine started to assume the roles wherever money could be made. Then followed the wedding dancer, a TV host, a stage host and finally an IPL team owner. Finally the human machine had the chance to compete with men who owned steel machines. The IPL got its first and only team owner who had no product to sell but himself. And somehow it was only apt that he got outmuscled initially because it would have been too much of a fairytale ending had he succeeded upfront.

But all this contributed to both, his hope and his dream. A man who has walked a lonely road has given enough of happiness to his family and enough of pride to his parents who unfortunately could not see their son rule the City he always wanted to rule. He himself admits that he cannot imagine walking on the road with people not recognizing him. I cannot agree more with a man who has given more than two decades of his life just to be recognized, just to be rich and just to be a star. So just live and let him live.

I cannot conclude on a better note than to give him an acronym as my tribute to him. No matter how many people hate him or ridicule him, he is the one who has taught me to stand tall and live life like a King. He is the one who has taught me to fail and let people write me off so that when I succeed, I dont have a crowd to celebrate with. He is the one who has taught me to be confident, be pompous, be very proud, yet be humble and above all, be a Star. I am just happy that he is blessed with the three most beautiful things in life, S-Shohrat, R-Raeesi, K-Kismat….

By Mukund Umesh Thakkar (Director, Nav Bharat Metalic Oxide Industries Pvt. Ltd.)

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