Superstar Shah Rukh Khan appeared at on the second day of the ongoing ET Global Business Summit. He took to the stage to charm business luminaries from across the globe and discussed the digitisation and the future of cinema.
The actor included everything in his speech with his trademark jokes and his desire to become a legend.
Here’s King Khan’s complete speech:
” Good evening, everybody. Sorry. This is too early for me…I meant good afternoon all.
As I see you all sitting here I have two different set of emotions in my heart. One is that I am a bit envious of some of you. The other is that I am feeling really bad for some of you too.
I have been made to understand that some of you have paid money to be here. So, there must be some of you here who are only doing this as a part of your corporate duty. Thinking damn we have to sit here and listen to some number crunching mind numbing statistic being spewed out by some industry expert who is going to bore us to death.
But hey wait…out walks this handsome hunk of a man…a true blue star…Shah Rukh Khan. So I envy that half jinko itne se paison mein main mil gaya.
And the other half…who really came to learn some new business revelation about the cinema and media industry, I feel bad for you. Because honestly, I am no businessman.
A man who looks good in a suit is not always a businessman.
I have not been to Wharton or Harvard business schools. Neither did my father leave me a lucrative bicycle business which I have turned into an automobile industry giant over the years. Actually my father gave me nothing…he was 6 feet 2 and he did not even give me his height! I hold that against him.
And the most important aspect of business I have never done or know how to….that is how to extract loans from a bank, so I am going to be of no use to serious businessman at all.
What I will say here will be quite useless to you. I really just came last night to take a picture with the honorable PM as I am the only one who doesn’t have a picture with him and got stuck in this speech here.
Now that we are here you all might as well listen to me for 10 minutes, and I do have three four points where I feel the future of cinema is headed and those of you who are in the business of it cinema can figure out if you can adapt your media business to those changes, if I am right, and maybe flourish.
I’ve been in the movie business for 26 years. That’s exactly half my life. From here on, I will have been part of the world of cinema for more years than I have been part of the world outside it. Keeping pace with this momentous realisation, when I turned fifty-two I decided it was time to be done with the ‘superstar’ tag and go straight for the ‘legend’ one.
I want to be a legend. And there’s only one reason for this burning new desire in me: no egotistic, self-centred megastar worth his salt ever faded into the past without trying to wedge his foot into the door of the future. I want to belong to the future of cinema as much as I have belonged to the last twenty-five years of it. It’s just too exciting a prospect for me to give it a pass.
Since they don’t make books titled ‘How to become a legend’, I rummaged through my personal library of 15000 books…okay maybe I exaggerate. Forgive me. I looked in my library of 423 books for something intelligent enough to give me some ideas on how to go about it. As it happens, my eye fell upon a book that pertained to the past, not the future. It’s called ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’. I got through about three chapters, enough to tell me that homo-sapiens dominated all others species due to one single reason. They gossiped!
That is, they were able to spread ideas and organise themselves around those ideas. They did this by telling stories. This information fed straight into my insatiable appetite for future legend-hood. If early homosapiens dominated the world by being able to tell stories, hell…so can I!
In fact, stories and their telling have anchored communication between human beings throughout their existence. I had a private tutor, the types whose breath smells of onions and he would charge 20 rupees per one hour session. He also had a strange accent and he would enlighten me every time before each lesson. “History means Hees- Ishtory, that is, the ishtory of man.”
With due apologies to all the ladies in the room, in those days misogyny passed unnoticed in an all-boy’s school. Now, of course we all know better, so let me make this politically correct on his behalf, history is the story of woman and man.
But my teacher was right about one thing, human history was recorded in stories, so were religions and mythologies and societal changes. In fact the greatest ideas that have moved human beings into action, organised them into societies and created in them a sense of the greater good have been rooted in stories. Stories lead to entertainment: dance, music, art and drama are all derivatives of storytelling, and as human beings evolved, so did the tools of storytelling and entertainment.
Filmmaking is the modern art of storytelling and just like the constant evolution of our species, filmmaking too, has evolved immensely from where it began.
There has been a radical change in cinema and its content over the years. Change even in the way we consume cinema. But right now as we sit here I think that we are witnessing perhaps the greatest change of all. In this century, the greatest evolutionary revolution that has taken place in humankind has been the opening up of communication.
And this opening up of communication has begun to, and will continue to, destroy boundaries whether in cinema or in the way that human beings organise themselves in other spheres.
Social media has already altered the world of entertainment phenomenally but what we see today isn’t even the beginning of it. So now getting down to what I really think is going to happen in the future. As movie-making and cinema is concerned, I can foresee a number of walls that will crumble:
With the advent of digitisation and big data, we can expect the dismantling of many conventions. Dramatic changes will take place in the way we entertain and in the commercial aspects of the trade, especially in India, since we are one of the greatest untapped markets for digital consumerism. The dynamics of selling a film, of attracting viewers to it and even of critiquing it are going to change drastically. We may lose ground in the conventional sense and gain ground with new horizons to market or be able to garner more eyeballs than ever before.
– The boundaries that define content will fall. The length of movies will alter. They may not be as long as they currently are (at least in our part of the world). Different aspects in different social and psychological geographies will evolve. The things we cannot discuss or portray publicly today will be shown openly and portrayed with impunity tomorrow.
Free expression will no longer be held back in a world where access to communication platforms will be open to all. Curbing it will be a virtual impossibility. Ideas will travel with greater speed and force than ever before. This will mean that even production boundaries will break free. Concentration of power in terms of large production companies run by individuals will give way to crowd funding and more democratised production decisions taken on the basis of public demand that will be accessed through alternate media platforms in the way that Netflix is doing for instance.
– For all the up-start actors (like me) who imagine themselves as production tzars, there will be people organising over the internet and social media and producing their very own movies with as much success. Many of us here might have to wisen and up and become inclusive or just close shop!
– The boundaries between viewers and films will dissolve. You will no longer watch a movie only to be momentarily pulled into its emotion and experience. The movie will become the experience. Viewers will be able to define scenes and participate in them. Viewers will decide ‘Don ko pakadna mushkil hai ki nahi’.
– In fact actors like me might even cease to exist and the virtual world of artificial intelligence might take over entirely. The boundaries between reality and virtual reality will certainly diminish. VFX has come a long way since lumbering dinosaurs chased the irresistibly sexy Rachel Welsch in ‘One Million Years BC’ and brought the entire history class of 45 adolescent boys to a standstill, after all!
– The entire manner in which movies are watched may change too. Instead of going to the cinema, the cinema will probably come a lot closer home as it is already doing through Netflix and other such entities. On the other hand, perhaps movie-watching could become the hub around which community entertainment comes together as well. Like Mr. George Lucas has stated, going to the movies, would become exclusive and expensive. A cinema would be like a Broadway show, the movie might play for an entire year. In his vision of the future of cinema, you’d pay for an exclusive experience with all the perks in the world: drinks, culinary experiences, comfort etc. but that would be all that will be left of what we know the movie business to be today.
If I was to check the boxes my future in this future world looks rather bright. All this AI stuff and Virtual Reality, will still be relevant for me, as Sophia the Citizen robot says she loves me. So I have that covered.
If I was to believe Mr. Lucas then a movie will run for years in a theater, I already have ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge’ running for 20-odd years. As far as bringing movies to the homes is concerned, I already have a Netflix deal. But with the given expansion in technology it’s not just me but anyone amongst the 7 billion people in the world who can become a legend.
So the business of cinema will depend upon finding that talent which exists all around, not just in the hands of few and presenting it to the consumers. All the innovations that I have cited here will only make it easier for the world to do the business of cinema, and find new legends to rule the world, but there is one caveat. As I said in the beginning, Homo Sapiens dominated all other species because we learned how to allow ideas to move, spread and how to organise each other around those ideas. In other words, ideas move human beings. And they do so not because we are bigger, or faster, or stronger, or have any other physical evolutionary prowess, but because ideas ensnare human emotion. Emotions have built and destroyed civilizations. Over the ages, the transmission of ideas has evolved. But wherever technological revolutions and social reorganisations take the art of storytelling to, one thing is clear: the essence of storytelling and therefore filmmaking remains its ability to elicit emotion and bond people together in the experience of it.
I believe that the future of cinema will ride on the back of the future of human emotion.
Tomorrow’s world will not be a controllable world. It will be, in many ways, an “out of control” world. Nobody, however powerful, strong or resource-rich will be able to define and constrict the flow of information. It is really up to us whether we want to infuse this flow of communication with ideas that uplift humankind and make us more sentient beings or not.
The ideas of knowledge, cooperation, creativity, innovation, acceptance, peace and freedom ought to flood the world. As film-makers, businessmen, I believe, the business of cinema in the future as in the past, will prosper only if we can forge a future in which entertainment remains about sharing emotion, happiness and the most magical idea of all; love. And because I have been spreading love every time I spread my arms I think I will be a legend after all.
Before I end I want to add something more, actually it’s a disclaimer, this whole speech is original and not plagiarized or copied from anywhere. There are some thoughts that I have said elsewhere, but these are my thoughts and I can repeat them. Don’t hold that against me. Any resemblance to people places and things, living or dead is purely coincidental. Anything that might have hurt the sentiment of any group or groups of people is unintentional and without malice. I don’t even know you exist. This may also include any new organisations, trusts or new hooligans or new fringe that may not exist today but may evolve later. This does not include boys and girls having a fringe haircut a la Sadhanaji. I love her. Anything or any words which may irk or feel troublesome to any troll or hardliners, please free to change them at will, if the speech seems better with those changes or even worse.
Even after all this I may have hurt the sentiments of any over-sensitive being human or non-human living or dead, I already tender an unconditional apology and take my words back, to where they belong, which is a place I cannot mention publicly. A written apology for the same is also attached herewith my thumbprint and signature. Also please do not troll me for this speech because of my star status, religion or handsomeness. Just accept the fact some guys have all the luck and are rich sexy superstars. Live with it. Finally do not, I repeat do not ban my films for God’s sake.
I want to thank TOI for giving me a platform where I could exercise my right to expression fearlessly and abandon.
Thank you all you may ask me questions except these:
1. My legal issues.
2. Why I don’t do films based on sports nationalism and social relevance.