PLUS! DADDY JO DECODED BY FREDDY BIRDY

DECODING DOTING DAD KARAN JOHAR THROUGH THE EYES OF HIS NEWEST LITTLE SUPERSTARS

Nobody in modern India, nobody alive, at least, has been untouched by Karan Johar [I speak metaphorically, of course, but then again...]. Will the real Karan Johar please stand up? Is he the 3am confidant to the superstars? Box office mogul? Starmaker? Pop icon? Twilight dancer? Influencer? Fashion iconoclast? iPhone reflection lover? All of the above? Brand Johar is fourth only to Coke, McDonald’s and Haldiram’s in its universality, spreading across Ludhiana to NRI London. His chat shows are so intimate in their references, even the guests look slightly bewildered. What an episode of Koffee With Karan is telling you, dear viewer, is this: I am Karan Johar. I have a lot of money. I am a genius. But I will disguise it all brilliantly in frivolity, meaningless banter and endless names dropping. I will have you glued to your television set, because your best friend is not Gauri Khan, because Katrina Kaif doesn’t ‘consult’ you about her love-life at 2:30am, and just try air-kissing Mrs. Joglekar in your building society B block, the way I do Janhvi Kapoor or Sid Malhotra. We want to wear all those clothes he is wearing, Spanish designers with 10-word names, but on our five-figure incomes. We want to schmooze on WhatsApp with film stars, but only intimately so, with their pet name personas: Kadso and Bebo and Sha [a certain Mr. Khan, but no prizes for guessing]. We want to watch people who earn average yearly incomes about six times the annual GDP of Poland fight over the hamper like us normal real life folk trying to snatch a seat on the Virar local, next to the lady slicing bhindi for her dinner when she gets home. We want, for one full hour, to be painfully thin, gossip about everyone and everything outside our immediate presence, pretendsip cups of coffee, be asked ‘rapid fire‘ questions and wish we had Zoya Akhtar or Stella McCartney on speed dial [Zo, can you say, “Hello Karan it’s me?”]. To show that he is “one of us’’, that is the average Mumbaikar who travels through two-and-a-half hours of traffic to reach work, Karan will plod to a far-flung suburban studio where he judges ordinary people on superhit reality shows. Now this is a humbler, more ‘regular’ Karan, the clothes get cheaper [Ungaro, prêt-à-porter vs Comme des Garçons, haute couture], one who cries remembering some traumatic childhood incident [My best friends Adi and Duggu got Toblerones in their school tiffin boxes, but my father was a struggling producer, so I only got, [wipes away a tear], KitKats.].

TWINS ‘R US! Karan Johar’s twins are named after his parents: his son is called Yash after his late father, and his daughter’s name is Roohi, which is a rearrangement of the letters of his mother’s name, Hiroo

ALL ABOUT LOVING HIS CHILDREN After becoming a father in 2017, Karan Johar gave his first interview to HT Brunch. Since he wasn’t comfortable sharing pictures of his infant babies then, the magazine used an artists’ impression and called the filmmaker ‘Daddy Jo!’”