Shahrukh Khan may be practically spending 20 hours a day into promotion of Chennai Express. However when he sits down for a conversation, he makes sure that every minute spent with him counts. This is pretty much the case as we catch up with him barely a day before the film's release.
Starting from Kabhi Alvidaa Naa Kehna, each of your last 10 films has been successful with seven netting over 50 crores and last three hitting a century. How have you maintained this consistency?
Well, in spite of all this people say that I am not as successful as I was five years ago (smiles). I don't need to show my past records for my present form. I tell people that after being in the industry for 22 years, I have been desensitised to a lot of things, especially when it comes to how people measure my success. See, measure of success is the ultimate failure. At the end of the success will come an ultimate failure. That’s when you stop. Till that thing happens, you can't make success tangible. You can't say that picture ne 300 crore kar liye toh achchi success hogi. I don't think like that. I don't have tangibility to success.
Please elaborate.
See, I have been working consistently, non-stop, 22 years for 15 hours a day. I get very excited being in front of the camera. There were times when I used to get excited ki chalo picture hit ho gayi. Today it is about whether I have made people happier than my last successes. The idea of success is that it should be consistently successful till that final failure comes. Till then I can't say that agar 500 crore ki picture ho jaayegi toh main bahaut successful ho jaaonga. Phir uske baad main kya karoon? Should I stop?
So what drives you to keep moving?
I wake up thinking that whether my story will make people successful. A film is like you child. If a child is not doing well in class then still you love him the same. Yes, if he performs then you are proud of him but then you don't start loving him more because he got good marks. Films are like children. On Friday they become someone else's. I see it like that. This is the reason why I have not gotten into the rut or even given it all a stray thought.
How do you look at success?
The strange thing about success is that when a person becomes successful, even he doesn't know that how he got it. That's the beauty of success, you can’t pass it on. You can't just hand it over to friends and others. Forget the outsider, success cannot be understood even by the person who is successful. I myself cannot sit down and see that. It is a very easy anyways to give a number to success. It is like ki chalo samajh nahi aaye toh number de do. Aise nahi hota hai.
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