Karan Johar bares it all in memoir

From fallout with actresses to his sexual encounters, Bollywood director and producer does not hold back in ‘An Unsuitable Boy’

The much-anticipated memoir of filmmaker Karan Johar has been creating waves on social media after chapters describing his fallout with actress Kajol were leaked on Twitter. But contrary to initial reports, An

Unsuitable Boy is much more than just the narrative of a fallout.

Honest, decisive and compelling, it lays bare the other side of Bollywood’s pomp and gaiety.

It’s also brutally frank about Kajol. “I don’t have a relationship with Kajol any more. We have had a fallout. Something happened that disturbed me deeply which I will not talk about because it is something that I like to protect and I feel it would not be fair to her or to me. After two-and-a-half decades, Kajol and I don’t talk at all,” he writes.

Last year, Kajol’s husband Ajay Devgn went public with a recorded conversation with self-proclaimed film critic Kamaal R. Khan, who allegedly said he was paid Rs2.5 million (Dh134,476) by Johar to write favourably about Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil.

Devgn demanded an investigation into the matter and Kajol came out in her husband’s support by tweeting, “Shocked”.

Johar says her tweet was the final straw for him. “Before the release of Ae Dil Hai

Mushkil, there’s a lot that happened. Things were said, crazy accusations were made against me, that I had bribed someone to sabotage her husband’s film. I can’t even say that I was hurt or pained by it. I just wanted to blank it out.

“When she reacted to the whole situation, and put out a tweet saying, ‘Shocked!’, that’s when I knew it was completely over for me. The tweet validated the insanity, that she could believe I would bribe someone. I felt that’s it. It’s over. And she can never come back to my life. I don’t think she wants to either,” Johar writes in the book.

Kajol played the lead actress in Johar’s debut film, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai

Honest, decisive and compelling, An

Unsuitable Boy lays bare the other side of Bollywood’s pomp and gaiety.

(1998). They later went on to work in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and My

Name Is Khan. Johar also considered her his lucky charm with the actress making an appearance in most of his films.

“The problem was actually never between her and me. It was between her husband and me, something which only she knows about, he knows about, and I know about. I want to keep it at that. I don’t really want to say what transpired. But I did feel that she needed to apologise for something she didn’t do.

“I wouldn’t want to give a piece of myself to her at all because she’s killed every bit of emotion I had for her for 25 years. I don’t think she deserves me. I feel nothing for her