How talking helped Karan Johar open his soul…

By Nichola

on January 15, 2018

For all his up-to-the-minute style choices and proximity to Bollywood’s most beautiful and famous, Karan Johar is a man on his own inner journey. Soul searching and achieving equanimity matters to him as much as bottomlines and the hottest parties probably do.
The filmmaker recently spoke about how his memoir was an exercise in opening up his soul even more. “Sometimes, opening about the minor or major details takes you back in time. Every time she (co-writer, Poonam Saxena) made me describe my old bedroom, house, people and the relationships, I went back and analysed and spoke about so much that I probably I had kind of blushed over.”

As a result, he excavated a lot of buried feelings. “Things that I didn't want to address and look back at but I knew I wanted to because that's the whole idea of writing a memoir. I think I spoke about all those things and it kind of opened my soul up even more. Sometimes, talking helps, just conversing helps and that's what I realised when I spoke to Poonam.”

Johar’s An Unsuitable Boy had been a searing read, in which Karan had spoken out and spoken true. He had addressed every issue from paying for sex, to the unsavoury rumours about him and Shah Rukh Khan. He had even opened up about the highly personal topic of losing his virginity, even disclosing that he had paid for it. The experience which he termed 'nerve-wracking', saw him admitting that he lost his virginity when he was 26, in New York. Not once, but twice. The second time he had sex, he wasn't happy about it, he wrote. “It just seemed a bit stupid; it seemed fake because obviously the person assigned to please you is going to please you artificially.”

Karan had also bared his hurt over the end of his 25-year-old friendship with Kajol, his rift with Kareena, and even his sexual orientation, about which he famously said, “Everybody knows what my sexual orientation is. I don't need to scream it out. If I need to spell it out, I won't only because I live in a country where I could possibly be jailed for saying this. Which is why I Karan Johar will not say the three words that possibly everybody knows about me.”