I have a favourite Aamir Khan story that should have absolutely been the crown jewel of my Bollywood book, if I ever get around to writing one. And given that I spent 12 years in the trenches as a Hindi film journalist and critic for The Telegraph, believe me, I have quite a few stories.
But this one. This one is different.
Dhobi Ghat had just released. I reviewed it for t2, the entertainment supplement of The Telegraph. I wrote that while Monica Dogra, Prateik Babbar, and Kriti Malhotra slipped into their characters like second skin — effortlessly, organically, exactly what Kiran Rao's debut needed — Aamir Khan stuck out like a sore thumb. He hadn't found the sur of the film. He was, in my honest critical opinion, miscast.
The review ran on Saturday.
Monday evening. Late. My phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number.
"Hi Pratim, when can I call? Aamir."
I went cold. I knew what film people do when you don't align with them creatively. They get vengeful. They get vindictive. They have long memories and longer grudges. And this wasn't just any film person. This was Aamir Khan. The perfectionist. The man who doesn't do anything without a reason.
With slightly unsteady fingers, I typed back: "Hi Aamir, we can speak now."
He called immediately.
In that inimitable style of his — measured, unhurried, punctuated with those trademark pauses that make you hang on every single word — he said he had read my review.
I braced myself.
He said he completely agreed with me.
I'm sorry — what?
Aamir Khan had called me, a film critic, to say I was right about his performance being off. I couldn't process it. Here was one of the biggest stars in Indian cinema, a man with nothing to prove to anyone, voluntarily picking up the phone to validate a critic's assessment of his own shortcomings. The silence on my end must have been deafening.
And then he said it. The line I will never forget: "I was the worst of the four."
He ended the call with four words that have stayed with me ever since: "Keep writing what you feel."
Years later, when I heard that he had auditioned for Kiran Rao's second film — Lapataa Ladies, which he was producing — and that she had ultimately gone with Ravi Kishen for the role instead, something clicked into place quietly inside me.
No ego. No entitlement. Just a man who understood his own limitations well enough to let go.
Nothing had changed. He was still that guy.
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