Dark Horse Arts and Sciences

I’m Shah Rukh Khan and I’m one of the richest actors in the world and the most popular and loved actor in my country. I have everything you may ever imagine, and even if I don’t, I can have it whenever I want. I have loved only one girl in my life and also have made her my life partner, and we both created a sweet and beautiful family altogether with immense love and passion. I am rich and famous. I can’t ask for anything more than this; there’s no room for complaint as I have been bestowed upon with everything I have ever desired by the Almighty. 

But sometimes I cry thinking about the fact that my ammi couldn’t see what I became; her happiness would have known no bounds seeing me in such a position; same applies to my abba. But I’m quite sure they would be observing all this from the stars twinkling in those dark skies. I’m happy for that at least.

Honestly speaking, I don’t know whether I am happy or not. I wouldn’t say I’m unhappy, but I’m not happy either. I’d always dreamt for all this, but now that I’ve got everything I had dreamt about, I’m starting to lose that dose of excitement or exhilaration in my life. A sense of boredom and monotony is arising within me because of the constant continuation of the same cycle over and over again. Wake up. Go to the shoot. Smile. Spread your arms like that. It’s all become too mundane and repetitive. I know this is show business, but I have begun to experience a sense of pointlessness and ridiculousness of it all. 

The fact that I have to smile in front of millions of people everyday even if I want to smile or not, bewilders me. Why do I have to pretend all day? Well, isn’t it quite ironic to ask this question as I’m an actor and that’s what my job is- to pretend and act like someone I’m not? Well I know it’s my job, but that’s on the set. Why do I have to pretend outside? I can be on my own, right? No, I can’t.

I can’t, not because I’m not capable of, but because I don’t have that luxury anymore. People say I can do whatever I want; but I don’t think that’s true. I can’t just go to a park with my kids on a saturday afternoon. I can’t go jogging on the streets with my new sports shoes on. At the end of the day, I have to run on a runmill in my house, on a machine; running like a machine to remain fit and healthy; not for my own sake, but for some film or six-pack abs commercial. 

I wouldn’t say I’m free anymore. I feel like I’m stuck inside a prison for the rest of my life. Even if I want to get out and I have all the resources to, I just can’t. I’m not talking about any physical prison here. I’m talking about a psychological prison; a prison cell once you are imprisoned into, there’s no way out anymore; not at least for the rest of your life. I’m plunged in the middle of popularity and my own privacy;  the real me got buried somewhere deep inside me the day I became an actor; the real me is gone, nowhere to be found anymore. Everyday, I experience a sense of nausea and sickness for being imprisoned inside my own cell. As I have become richer and more popular, I have eventually become more lonely and deserted. Though I have my wife and sweet stupid kids, I still feel that hollowness inside me; as if I am no longer here; as if I have only the blood and bones left within me but nothing else. The soul that resided once within me is now lost somewhere in the midst of all the fame and limelight. In the last few years, I’ve started to feel that sense of emptiness inside me; the type of emptiness and void you get to find in interstellar space. I’m nothing but a body made up of flesh and blood right now. I can’t handle all this anymore. I just want to run away somewhere nobody would ever find a trace of. I want to move to some mysterious island which will have a portal kind of thing that will lead me to another world where not a soul would recognize me; so that I would be able to live an anonymous and normal life like others. But I can’t. I just can’t leave my family like this. It would be too cowardly and irresponsible. Even though I find it all absurd and meaningless, I have to live among all of this. I have to, someway or the other, make amends with whatever I have and move on keeping away the abstractness and absurdity of it all. 

Tomorrow, I have to go to shoot again. Smile again. Spread my hands in a romantic pose all over again and again like an endless loop. But I just can’t do anything about it, can I? There’s nothing I can do to beat all this mundanity and monotony; to beat the loneliness and seclusion that I feel everyday. I just have to carry on without complaining; take everything into my stride that comes in the way. That’s how it’s gonna be for the rest of my life. That’s how I have to live. I have no choice. Neither do you. Neither does anyone.