Time of the heroes

Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, and sitar exponent Anoushka Shankar feature prominently in Time’s 20 Asian Heroes under the age of 40.

Thirtyeight–year-old Khan, who is currently on a song-and-dance tour of Europe and North America, has had a run of hits since 1995 and is believed to have raked in a quarter of a billion dollars.

"No one holds a candle to him," says director and friend Karan Johar, who insists on casting Khan as lead in all his films. "Forget the top 10. He is one-to-fifty by himself," says Johar.

Khan began his filmy career as a wannabe director who drifted into soap-opera acting and only moved to Mumbai from Delhi in 1991 to make a fresh start after his parents died.

His secret, says Khan, is always playing the coy, cheeky lead. But playing the good guy all the time can be a burden.

Khan says he craves something different. "I want to beat people up. I tell the directors... next time I knock on a door and a girl opens it, can I slap her? Or shoot her?" He says he has played the same part for so long that he worries it has followed him home. "I am acting all the time. When I go on set, I don’t have to prepare myself. And, when I am not on set, I am still acting".

The magazine also features 38-year-old Gautam Goswami, an upright Indian civil servant whose reputation for upholding the law has made him a national figure and helped the image of civil service perceived by many Indians as being corrupt or inefficient.

When flash floods hit Bihar in July, Goswami, District Magistrate of Patna, coordinated a massive relief effort that involved the government, Army and international aid agencies.

Goswami was put in charge of the ballot in 1999. He barricaded Patna, so that gunmen in cars couldn’t enter the city, and set up telephone lines for citizens to call in with complaints. In 1999 and 2004, with Goswami as the overseer, Patna had the two fairest elections it had seen in years.

Time has also listed Anoushka Shankar, 23-year old daughter of Pandit Ravi Shankar. She is doing what her father never would have thought necessary — bringing Indian classical music back home. Since the age of 13, she has made sitar an instrument not just of a silky melody but of a cultural revival.— PTI

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