‘Everything about Salman begins with his father. His story is pure cinema if you think of it. He is a boy who was dismissed as lost, drifting in the shadow of a brilliant man, branded a rebel without a cause. But somewhere along the way, he outran the myth he was meant to follow,’ a veteran journalist once told me while describing what makes Salman who he is.

To me, this sentence felt like a map to understanding the actor. To understand Salman, you have to understand the khandaan (family) and its patriarch, Salim Khan. For India, he is the architect of modern Hindi cinema. A disruptor, who, along with his writing partner Javed Akhtar, constructed the DNA of present-day Bollywood. He is the man Salman hero-worships.

Salim Khan is a complex man to understand. A boy who lost his mother at eight and his father at fifteen, his life was shaped by loss and loneliness. Perhaps that is why he learnt early on to be stoic, and to wrap his pain up in stories. His hardships would eventually become Hindi cinema’s most iconic dialogue: ‘Mere paas Maa hai [I have my mother] …’

Salim is a man born to be seen. Slightly arrogant, with an acerbic sense...

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