The Badshah gets booked!

Anybody wanting to write a book on superstar Shah Rukh Khan is bound to be befuddled. How do you encapsulate the life of a star who has no full-stops? That's why journalist-turned-writer Mushtaq Sheikh has rightly titled his four-year-long labour of love on Bollywood's Badshah as 'Still Reading Khan'.

Strangely, when Mushtaq first tossed the idea of this coffee table book to his muse, SRK's first reaction was, "But why?" The potential biographer had then counter questioned, "Why not?" Years later Mushtaq stunned SRK with a dummy of the four-kilo tome.

Time revisited

Mushtaq recalls, "When I started, my head was reeling with the vastness of the subject. I thought I would work smart. But I realised that I had to initiate from scratch. I began writing the book in a linear pattern."

The wordsmith began from Delhi, SRK's homeland. "There is a lot about SRK that people already know, a lot that he himself has voluntarily allowed people to peep into. So, for me to get something new on the table was a challenge," says Mushtaq. For this 'travelogue' on SRK, Mushtaq met the star's friends from NSD (National School of Drama) and his college friends. He even visited the house in which SRK lived.

Surprises galore

Mushtaq says that his book is not a boring treatise. He adds, "It is stylish, classy and fun." Doesn't this sound much like the show 'Koffee with Karan'? Mushtaq's rejoinder is, "It's my Koffee Sheikh!"

That the author has known his hero for more than 11 years and that they are good friends, did allow him to invade the space that SRK otherwise would not allow any other aspirant. Yet Mushtaq says, "I did not ask Shah Rukh even for a single contact or number. I may have troubled Gauri (Khan) and Karan (Johar) for information though. I wanted to gather such data and photographs that would leave SRK surprised." That King Khan himself was amazed to see some of the pictures, only suggests how much his fans would be!