For over 30 years, Shah Rukh Khan has been India’s nervous system, absorbing its ache, irony and aspiration. At 60, he has outgrown superstardom to become India’s most fluent expression of love, wit and grace
There is a reason people call Shah Rukh Khan the last of the superstars. For nearly three and a half decades, he’s been an actor who metabolises emotion for the nation. As our collective nervous system, he has been taking in the ache, the irony, the yearning, and reflecting it to the nameless faces with a flair all his own.
SRK, “the king of romance,” stands at the centre of a cottage industry of feeling. The endless clips of his laughter on fan pages, the threads decoding his interviews like scripture, the strangers confessing online that “he raised my standards for love” — all part of a cultural side hustle called belief that keeps renewing itself in his image.
At 60, Shah Rukh Khan has outgrown the idea of personhood or superstardom and become a medium through which the country continues to negotiate its appetite for romance. We project onto him what we want India, and ourselves, to be: soft in spirit, sharp in wit, endlessly resilient. At 60, then, he remains the country’s most accessible fantasy, an actor fluent in our realness.
The second coming
But SRK — ‘King Khan’ to legions of his fans — didn’t always have the throne. He began as an outsider who learned how to move crowds. In his early films, there was grit: an anti-hero in Baazigar (1993), a cheeky underdog in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994), a romantic in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). Over time, he taught himself — and us — how to be many things at once: comic and sad, slick and tender, global and rooted.
That elasticity is why Om Shanti Om (2007) could let him wink at his own legend while Swades left him whispering the country’s conscience. In Chak De! India, he is not the lover but the caretaker of a team, a man whose rage becomes the architecture of trust. In Pathaan (2023), he turned the act of return into performance art: the body of a survivor, the charm of a megastar, the weight of a nation’s longing disguised as an action set-piece.
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To me, it was Jawan (2023) that cemented the second coming of Shah Rukh Khan — a father and a son, a soldier and a ghost, a myth split into two mirrors. The double role was a metaphor for the actor himself: the man who has to play both the dream and the disappointment, the rebel and the reassurance. When he accepted the National Award for Jawan, it was a country quietly confessing that emotion still moves it. It was an argument disguised as celebration: that mass cinema can have meaning, that populism and prestige aren’t enemies, that the heart still deserves a place in the canon.
His nuclear aura
Because the truth is, SRK has been India’s emotional infrastructure: the dependable bridge between chaos and catharsis. His movies, instead of holding up a mirror, hand us one, asking us to look again, and love what we see despite the cracks. Aditya Chopra once diagnosed his stardom perfectly: “Your eyes have something that cannot be just wasted on action.” He was right. Those restless but tender eyes did what no explosion could: they detonated empathy.
Shah Rukh Khan in Jawan
They made longing cinematic, taught a generation that intensity could be intimate, that gentleness could be grand. When Shah Rukh Khan spreads his arms — his signature pose — it is both invitation and reassurance. They promise that the mess of being Indian — ambitious, self-conscious, overworked, and still absurdly hopeful — can, with the right angle of light and music, feel like romance. SRK allows a country perpetually in translation to believe, for a few hours, in the coherence of its own sentiment.
Before fandom had metrics, it had Shah Rukh Khan. He taught millions that to love a star was to feel seen. At 60, the sharpness is still there, but it is now underlined by fatigue that comes only from surviving your own mythology. There’s something profoundly moving about watching a man once worshipped for his youth and romance now choosing roles that embrace age, risk, and consequence. Pathaan could have been an easy nostalgia act, but he played it like a reclamation: of body, of belonging, of the right to remain the nation’s favourite outsider. The hair is greyer, the grin slower, but the aura — that cocktail of intelligence and mischief — remains nuclear.
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And maybe that’s why his Muslim identity, often spoken of in hushed awe, matters even more now. In an increasingly divided time, he has never sermonised, never weaponised his difference. He has simply lived it. “My wife is Hindu, I’m Muslim, my kids are Hindustan,” he once said. It’s a line that sounds casual until you realise that it’s a manifesto disguised as a family anecdote. On screen, his Indianness is so total that it refuses to be boxed by a surname or scripts. In him, pluralism feels effortless again.
His wit, self-deprecating charm
In all these years, Shah Rukh Khan has practised an unusual form of image management. The story of the middle-class boy from Delhi, failed sportsman and theatre kid, has become a kind of folklore. In interviews, he performs humility with timing so perfect it feels improvised. He talks about cooking for his children, reading late into the night, being “lazy between films,” and still somehow the myth grows. He is one of the wittiest and most self-deprecating stars, who is adept in the art of laughing at himself. What keeps the image from collapsing under its own polish is that his intelligence is always visible, always self-aware.
He gives away just enough to humanise himself, never enough to diminish the mystery. He speaks of failure without self-pity, of success without triumphalism. He will describe fame as “lonely,” then immediately pivot to gratitude, as though emotional transparency must always arrive with a disclaimer. He has outlasted the spectacle of fame by treating it like conversation: direct, courteous, slyly self-critical. Among his less-talked-about traits are his eloquence and his grace. Watch any of his interviews and you’ll know what I mean. You can see it in the way he greets a hostile question with amusement rather than anger, or how he deflects criticism without losing face or warmth.
Today, Shah Rukh Khan stands for continuity in a country addicted to, and perpetually in rehearsal for, reinvention. His charisma doesn’t demand attention; it earns it. He represents a masculinity fluent in apology, a quality still radical in the grammar of Hindi cinema. In his best films, love isn’t conquest but an unending discourse: Dil Se, Kal Ho Naa Ho, Chak De! India et al speak of affection as endurance, of desire as negotiation. Even his missteps (Fan, Zero, Jab Harry Met Sejal) read like experiments in maintaining dialogue with a nation forever revising its vocabulary.
A practiced illusionist
To be a Shah Rukh Khan fan in 2025, then, is to inhabit a long-term relationship that has survived distance, disillusionment, time and the gradual erosion of collective wonder. It is to believe, stubbornly, in the endurance of feeling. Even as the world grows more ironic, more divided, his sincerity still cuts through noise and the depredations of our time. Because when he meets your gaze on screen, it’s a pact: that feeling, no matter how bruised, will not be abandoned.
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When he enters a frame, India exhales, not out of habit, but recognition. Because what he offers isn’t just escapism, it’s alignment. For a fleeting moment, we remember what it’s like to feel the same thing, together. And that’s the thing about Shah Rukh Khan: he is the movie star who gives a face to our contradictions and shows that sentiment, when rendered with intelligence, can still be subversive. He is the modern India we want to believe in: bruised but romantic, pragmatic yet kind, endlessly self-aware, and still capable of wonder.
At 60, Shah Rukh Khan is no longer just a superstar but also a shared memory, and a repository: He contains within him the archives of a liberalising India: its optimism, its exhaustion, its soft power turned inward. To watch him now is to revisit the texture of a time when emotion was prized. If cinema is a mirror, he remains its most practiced illusionist; if it is therapy, he is its most persuasive clinician, diagnosing, again and again, the national desire to feel visible in its own fiction.
