SRK is not just the last of the superstars because of what he has achieved, but because of how he has done it. In an era where stardom was built on distance, he created intimacy.

The son of a freedom fighter and a dreamer from Peshawar, he carried loss like a shadow — both parents gone before he was 25 — and turned that grief into fuel. From that pain, he built something larger than cinema: a new idea of the Indian man.