Why it's fun being Farah Khan

Her reels inspire spoof reels, there’s a food show in her kitty, and roast chicken and yakhni pulao stirring in the kitchen three times a week for friends. The director choreographs social media well too

It comes as no surprise that Farah Khan does her own social media—shooting, editing, setting it to music and staying away from trends. They are mini creativity shots, the most fun you can have with Khan without being in her inner circle that comprises a gamut of constellations: There’s, of course, Karan Johar, SRK, Anil Kapoor, etc; Her work crew at Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa, Malaika Arora, Arshad Warsi; production department HODs, hovering over tubs of aforementioned pulao or chicken, eating together on Mondays; The younger lot, like Ananya Pandey, whom she has seen grow up and been fast friends with their parents; The “alternate universe” that Johar calls her coterie of Patralekha, Rajkummar Rao and Huma Qureshi; and then the bunch that has been playing Articulate together for 20 years (“We make our own cards now; we ran out of all the provided ones 15 years ago”), which includes Malaika, Arvind and Tanya Dubash, Farhad Taraporewala, Shweta Bachchan, Rahul Bose, Kajal Anand and a bunch of rotating cast (“‘Aye, bring someone with you no’ we tell each other when we get bored …”).The last lot there are no pictures of, except for the one that the winner takes for bragging rights.

So, all her life is not on her Instagram, and certainly not selfies taken in special clothes. “I first consider what is entertaining,” says Khan, in the expanse of her joyously appointed—and inhabited—living room. “I find it boring taking pictures of myself.  People spend lakhs of rupees [to hire a hair and make-up person, a stylist, a photographer] on one evening, go to a party to just take pictures, and then they have to upload them immediately—after they edit them and apply filters. ‘But when did you have fun?’ I want to ask them.”

We’re talking about her social media game, which is top notch. Take for instance, her banter with bestie Karan. “They should just give us a show; we’re putting it out in the universe,” she interjects. “We don’t practise anything, we just start—he’s truly witty and doesn’t mind being made fun of. That thing I said, ‘First you couldn’t get out of the closet, now you can’t go back in...’ has gone viral.”

She was introduced to Reels by bestie Sania Mirza and her sister. “Now she has stopped making them,” she says with the slight accusation we reserve for best friends who dare live away from us. “We used to first make them on the trending song, move, etc… but I found it boring.”

Now she thinks up her own content, spending no more than an hour a day on social media cumulatively. So much of her resonates—especially the ones on set—with work besties/spouses in every office. The threat to return her dabbas, banter with colleagues and a lot she gets away with by way of being close to so many generations and types of actors and filmmakers through her decades as a choreographer and director (Main Hoon Na just completed 20 years).

“I only make reels with people I can banter with,” she says, “who have the same sense of humour. And I always ask before posting. If I get a social media team, then it will stop being fun. I want to do it when I feel like; I don’t want to have to post once a day to feed the beast. Now I get requests to do reels together.” Her food content has her in talks for a YouTube show. “I said 12 episodes of me in the kitchen, cooking with my cook or a friend; I know my cook will become a star after that, and leave me to go work for Shah Rukh. Or me with Mr Faizu [content creator Faisal Shaikh] going through Bhendi Bazaar on Eid.”

One of the reasons she would not have a social media team is because her phone is her sixth organ, attached to her body. “Firstly, I won’t be able to call my children or my driver or anyone. I only remember Shirish’s [husband, filmmaker Kunder] number. Secondly, if my chats get leaked, I will have to go into exile. My daughter has the habit of going through my phone; I tell her I’ll do the same when she has boyfriends. So ya, nobody is going to handle my phone.”

And yet people have taken it saying, “You are not following me?”, and hit the Follow button for her. “Then I mute them; you can’t unfollow them. Half the people I follow, I have muted.” A cursory glance at her handle shows 4.1 million followers and that she’s following 96. And more than peers, she likes accounts that inform her how things work, like the Hoover Dam. And she reads every comment, and likes them personally too, stopping just to block the mean ones. “If they are funny, I don’t mind. The most common ones are ‘Sajid in a wig’, which I don’t find funny anymore because I am much thinner than him. ” For the same reason, she finds spoofs of her, like those by comedienne Jamie Lever, funny. “I love Jamie! I’ve told her she needs to pay royalties because now she’s doing spoofs of my Reels.”  

And she’s candid enough to admit that fame online opens up new venues of revenue. This is not surprising from a person who admits that great trauma has given the entire family a dark sense of humour. “My entire family is so dysfunctional and it works for us; we’ve seen such hard times—my mother and all my aunts were child artistes; they were gravely exploited. My father, no matter if he was an alcoholic and down in the dumps, his sense of humour was intact: Sarcastic and cutting, which is where I get it from. My mother has a no-filter sense of humour. As a family, we have hid behind pews and laughed at funerals—like my grandmother’s, who converted to become a Born Again Christian and was buried. That’s what I tell my children—Sorry, I have not given you any dysfunction; I don’t know how you will have any fun…”

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