‘ I just wanted to be famous’
Salman Yusuff Khan, who shot to fame with his stint on reality show Dance India Dance, says that right from his childhood, he wanted to be famous. “I never planned to be an actor or a dancer, but I always wanted to do something that would make me famous. I was good in studies and extracurricular activities like stunt biking, football and calligraphy. Then I took to dancing and stuck to it,” he says.
Salman was born in Bengaluru but brought up in Saudi Arabia. “There is no scope for dance there but the medium excited me. When I returned to Bengaluru for my engineering course, I joined a dance group. First, it was only to impress girls but eventually dancing became a passion. I would dance even while studying and my friends would call me a ‘ freak’. I was in my final semester when I got selected for DID,” he recalls with a smile.
Salman says that his journey in showbiz has not been a struggle exactly but it was not easy either. “I won Dance India Dance and that got me noticed. After that I had nobody to guide me. I was home for six to seven months wondering what to do and then I began to get more offers.” He got a chance to perform in Salman Khan’s film Wanted and made his acting debut in Remo D’Souza’s Any Body Can Dance.
Currently, he is busy with his second dance reality show Jhalak Dikhlaa Jaa where he is paired with Dhrashti Dhami. “Dhrashti is a non- dancer and has been a challenge right from the start. But it’s a challenge even with trained dancers like Yana Gupta and Isha Sherwani. The standards go higher when someone like Lauren Gottileb is around who is more trained than the judges on the show,” he finishes.