Waking up today, I didn’t think my day would be too drastically different from the last. Boy, was I wrong. Ten minutes into being the barely-functioning zombie that I am at 7am, I opened Instagram to commence my customary start-of-the-day doom-scrolling and was inundated with a barrage of news articles, exclusive paparazzi videos, and official PR statements about Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan being stabbed. Six times. In the middle of the night. Inside his own home.
To say I gasped out loud would be an understatement. I immediately woke my partner up to share the urgent news because he knew just how much I loved Saif.
One of the four superstar Khans of Bollywood (Shah Rukh, Salman, and Aamir being the other three), Saif was stabbed with a knife by an intruder in the early hours of 16 January. He was subsequently rushed to Mumbai’s Lilavati Hospital, where he underwent surgery and is reportedly now, thankfully, stable.
The intruder had managed to enter the Khan residence and get into an altercation with Saif’s female house help. When Saif tried to intervene, he was stabbed.
As I read more and more details of the grisly attack — major injury to the thoracic spinal cord due to the lodged knife in his spine, two other deep wounds on his left hand and neck — I realised I was more affected by it than I thought I would be.
For context, I’m an Indian living in London, working as a journalist. My move to the UK has been fairly recent — just six months, in fact. Prior to that I had lived and worked in Mumbai as an entertainment journalist and celebrity anchor — so this one hit a little too close to home for me.
I immediately found myself thinking back to the time I had interviewed the enigma that is Saif Ali Khan and just how profoundly that interaction had impacted me. Over the years I’ve constantly been asked the question — who has been your favourite celebrity that you’ve interviewed? My answer has steadfastly remained Saif.
Known as the ‘Nawab of Bollywood’, Saif has royal blood. His ancestors were granted the princely state of Pataudi in 1804 under British rule, and he reluctantly accepted the bestowed title of the 10th Nawab of Pataudi in 2011. By this time he was already an accomplished actor, having made his Bollywood debut in 1993.
Although blue-blooded, Saif’s demeanour was anything but arrogant. In fact, I don’t think I’ve come across a celebrity as genteel as Saif, either before or since. He did however, have the quiet poise and refinement that comes with being nobility.
The movie I was interviewing Saif for, Bazaar, turned out to be a flop. But what I gained from my interaction with him was anything but. Talking to Saif was a lesson in compassion, humility, charm and wit.
My heavens, that wit. It left me floored. Prior to interviewing him, my ex-editor from my Mumbai workplace had told me about how approachable Saif was. She recounted an anecdote about her friend, another journalist, who had done a profile on Saif for a magazine a few years back at his residence in Mumbai. During the course of the interview, the two hit it off so well that this journalist ended up becoming one of Saif’s closest friends.
Stories like these are such a rarity that they make you sit up and take notice. Because how often does a famous celebrity, anywhere in the world, befriend a journalist? Admittedly, I don’t know the status of their friendship in 2025, but just the fact that this was a thing that happened told me all I needed to know about the kind of person Saif was.
And sure enough, as I chatted with him during my 35-minute interview slot — I could understand the allure of forging a friendship with Saif.
What’s more, I could easily see how he would end up friends with a virtual stranger he bonded with over music for a couple of hours in his home. Such was the appeal of Saif Ali Khan.
During our interview — which his co-actors Chitrangada Singh and Rohan Mehra were also a part of — he made sure to keep addressing me by my name, which is not as common an occurrence as you would think, owing to the chaos that are press junket interviews.
What was most shocking to me though, was the fact that he actually seemed to care about what I had to say. Now I’m not saying that celebrities don’t pay attention to you when you speak, but between plugging their movie, covering all the talking points that they were most definitely briefed on by their teams, and trying to steer clear of any controversy whilst also making headline-worthy statements — it’s no wonder that sometimes they forget the human that’s sitting in front of them.
Not Saif though. He seemed to carefully consider every sentence that was coming out of my mouth and gave me an equally well thought out answer in return. So aware was he, of the fallacies of film promotions, that he actually paused mid-answer while telling me about his character in the movie and asked, “I’m sorry but do people actually give a cr*p about this?”
He looked at his co-stars sheepishly and went on, “You’ve been asking such great, thoughtful questions and you have such wonderful insights. But do people really want to hear some celebrity laboriously describing their character in a movie at great length? Isn’t this where you’ll lose the audience?”
To say I was shocked at the self-awareness would be putting it mildly. To date, not once in my eight-year history as a celebrity interviewer have I ever had an actor, much less the lead of the movie, ask me that so bluntly. And he was absolutely right, it was a filler question that I had to ask to appease the film’s PR team who had been kind enough to actually give me time with the cast. And I told him so in those many words.
“Oh, right, that makes absolute sense. Please continue doing your job, I’m very sorry for the interruption,” he said.
That, right there, is what makes Saif, Saif. And that was the moment he cemented himself as my favourite — for all of time.
The fact that he was generous with his praise didn’t hurt either. After a particularly thought-provoking question in which I’d asked the cast about what the media can change and do better in their interactions and reportage of celebrities, Saif made sure to take a moment on camera and thank me for asking a question he’d never been asked by a journalist before.
After we cut the cameras, he told me how much he’d enjoyed the conversation and that day I went back home feeling truly fulfilled by my work. This is the power of Saif. He made me feel good about myself with very little effort. If this was how he behaved with a stranger, I can only imagine how fulfilled his wife, Bollywood superstar Kareena Kapoor Khan, and the rest of his family must feel in his light. I’m glad that he’s safe.
The rest of my day will probably be spent thinking about this good-looking, eloquent, wildly charming, and, most importantly, kind Nawab.
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