Karan Johar Walks the Talk

 

Pleasant surprise over morning kcoffee…. Karan Johar as Shekhar Gupta’s guest on Walk the Talk, the pair strolling along the Bombay waterfront.   KJo was wearing jeans and big sandals with  a black short-sleeved tee shirt (that said Ready 2 Rock), and his usual big red watch.

Here’s a few highlights:

  • Karan commented that he’s never shot in Bombay.
  • For the first week  after his birth, he was named Rahul, but on the 6th day, his mother declared that she no longer liked the name, and pronounced him Karan.
  • He said that Aditya Chopra is his best friend and he spoke very warmly of Aditya’s calling him the day before he was due to go study in France, saying that he was a fake for doing so and that  Karan knew full well he should be making films.   Karan was angered at first by the comment, but slept on it and decided the next day that Adi was right.
  • He fainted the first time he worked with Amitabh Bachchan on K3G.   (AB went to college with Karan’s mother.)   When he came to after fainting, Amitabh Bachchan was standing over him and said “I promise I’ll dance well.   You don’t have to worry.”
  • He’s been working for the past year with Shibani Bhatija on the script of his next movie, which is a love story, and unlike other films which came to him easily, this is the first film where  he’s felt challenged to do a lot of research, and for that reason he’s been flying back and forth to LA and NY.  
  • He also did a quick rundown of the history of Hindi cinema:
    • ’40s & ’50s: brilliant,
    • ’60s: the picnic films where we all ran to the hill stations and screamed “Yahoo!” from Kashmir,
    • ’70s: the economic angst was reflected in films about the common man, the rise of Amitabh Bachchan,
    • ’80s: the worst period, an overdependence on Amitabh Bachchan led to everyone functioning on auto-pilot and cinema suffered as a result, it was also the time of a lot of remakes from South India that led to the influx of kitschiness, and “we were branded Bollywood by someone in England,”
    • ’90s: HAHK turned everything around, followed by  DDLJ, which led to great awareness about the overseas  market.

4 thoughts on “Karan Johar Walks the Talk

  1. Hey did you watch that episode of Devil’s advocate which comes in CNN-IBN in which Karan Johar posed questions to Karan Thapar – the usual host of that show. That was really a good show.

  2. The funny thing is that when I saw the show on TV, I actually thought of mentioning it on your blog and when I actually checked your blog
    the next day, I was pleasantly surprised to find the program details already posted on it.

  3. Hi Nic,

    Yes, true, that was something he signaled as a turning point.

    Thanks for adding that.

    NDTV does some really good shows… I like that one, plus We the People and Bombay Talkies, and the book show.

  4. Wow Maria that was really quick. It seems almost as if u r here in India.

    One additional point that Karan mentioned (though very briefly) in his brief history of Indian cinema was about QSQT.

    The success of the movie which had all newcomers right from the director, actors, singers and music directors went on to become a blockbuster and it opened the floodgates for new talent in Bollywood.

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