And so ends an era—of that chatty, often catty, talk show that weathered the birth of Instagram, the death of stardom, and the crisis of cinema.
Koffee With Karan has been a staple fixture of the talk show landscape since 2004, whose verbiage, including “rapid fire”, “conjecture”, and, well, “nepotism”, caught fire in the public imagination, and ignited Johar’s own image; a show whose presentations of personalities—Alia Bhatt as the one who did not know India’s president; Ranbir Kapoor as the one to be gifted condoms; Salman Khan as virginal, and Rakhi Sawant as virginal nightmare—we absorbed as fact, or parody, but whose presentation was, nonetheless, seeded here. 22 years, 162 episodes. It is all over. It’s done, brew.
Couples were formed here, and then re-appeared seasons later as separated. Crushes were exposed, and later, off-screen, pursued, only for the person to return to the couch un-crushed. Between appearances, there was often marriage, the birth of children, and the downward collapse or upward creep of careers. Life happened in between episodes, and now that the episodes will no longer drip, there is a strange feeling that life, itself, has ceased. Of course, this is a feeling. Not a fact.
I am being nostalgic, perhaps, for something that did not even exist, for the past few seasons the show had made clear there was no space for what the initial seasons had carved. A boredom seeped in. You could see through the facade, and the facade was not even compelling enough to give it thought—or time. All episodes blurred into one glitzy mess.
But nostalgia looks at the long arc. Between the birth and the demise—this, the ninth and final season—an industry shifted seismically. Its host, Karan Johar, too, became something else, a version, perhaps, unrecognisable to his debut season self. His personality shifted, caught the spotlight, his exposure exponentially rising, his voice louder, his personality more boisterous, he now has two kids, and the clothes he wears shimmers brighter, as does the set design and tone of the show itself. He now has to walk five steps to reach the guest couch. In the first season, the guests sat so close opposite him, Johar’s knuckles, holding the rapid fire questions, would show up in the edge of the guest’s close-up. The pageantry has been given an upgrade this season with a circular couch so big that when the camera pans along the guest—Salman Khan—sitting on it, it feels like he is on a rotating stage.
But, of course, the show had to evolve. Look at the disappearing necks of all the stars who kept finding themselves on the couch, skin loosening and creasing, and mourn the loss of time.
Mournful—that was the predominant feeling in the first episode of this final season, with Salman Khan and a guest appearance of Karisma Kapoor. It had the energy of sunset years, like it has more to look back on than look forward to. It felt like a eulogy. With knee pain, back ache, aneurysm and hernia, Khan has mellowed down. He loves to speak and Johar loves to let him keep speaking, like his cheerleader, like an overtly careful host, who doesn’t want to poke the mercurial guest’s kind facade.
Like every eulogy, it peddles in nostalgia. The 90s. Multiple shifts. Unsanitary sets. One Big Family. David Dhawan. Switzerland. And like all nostalgia, this, too, feels like a narrative imposed on a time, a narrative that won’t always capture what it truly meant to belong to the 90s, but what it means to remember the 90s.
The nostalgia is easy to enjoy. But there is something here I am not entirely comfortable with—this uncritical devotion to times past because our current times feel so shredded and alienated. Johar’s “order of illustrious gentleman … holding fort” — Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn, Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan — are all battling their obsolescence in their own ways. When Khan says, “We’re all interested in our work,” my head ticks down the laundry list of films where he looked like he sleep-walked onto the film set—and that list is very 2000s-2020s heavy. He stopped trying to make good movies. Johar surely knows this, but this isn’t something he wants to bring up—you don’t poke the bear. Even when Khan says “My life is an open book” only to contradict himself, saying later, “My life will go to my grave”, it is all let slide. Khan is what Khan says he is at that point of time.
When Johar is asked during the rapid fire about people who appeared on this couch who were too careful, I hoped he would have taken a beat and said—me, now. Khan, too, clocks this mehman-nawazi (hospitality). Right after the AV showing Khan’s appearances in seasons past—that boyish energy, that carelessness, all lost—Johar is trying to find the words, and goes with “You look so much more composed”, to which Khan responds, “You mean less energy!”
But, then, that is the show. It is Johar’s hospitality, not his instincts for some journalistic truth that create the mahaul (atmosphere) where actors settle into a version of themselves that is not seen elsewhere. Johar has done the intuitive calculus of what barriers can and can’t be breached, and the illusion of the show is the illusion of a shifting lakshman rekha that Johar is toying with—the edginess. But, in fact, the lines are clearly drawn, increasingly, not on sand, but wet concrete. And before it hardens and settles, it is best to slink off and fare thee well. It was a good run.