From a floppy-haired romantic to a man with moral compass to a misunderstood ‘perfectionist’, Aamir Khan has been many men in one skin. At 60, we’re still not done watching him reinvent
If Bollywood were a chessboard, Aamir Khan, who turned 60 on March 14, wouldn’t be the flamboyant king or the charging knight — he’d be the quiet bishop, moving diagonally, unexpectedly, shaping the game in ways that are only apparent several moves later. In the pantheon of Khans, Aamir occupies the strangest and most contradictory place. If Shah Rukh Khan is the eternal romantic, Salman the messiah of everything massy, and Saif the urbane outlier with a smirk, Aamir is the monk in the mountains, who disappears after every few years, then returns with something that demands your time and attention. Aamir is the Khan who cares, sometimes a little too much.
At the press meet on the eve of his 60th birthday, Aamir, who has married twice, introduced the woman with whom he now shares his life after he parted ways with Kiran Rao — Gauri Spratt, a Bengaluru-based professional who has known him for over two decades and has, over the past year, become a romantic partner. The announcement came with a request: that the paparazzi refrain from photographing her, that her privacy be honoured.
Asked if he would get married again, Aamir said: “Mushkil lag raha hai (looks difficult). I have so many relationships in my life right now. I have reconnected with my family, my kids, etc. I am very happy just being with people who are close to me.” It’s convenient to reduce Aamir Khan’s personal life to a tabloid ticker of divorces and new beginnings, but to do so is to be unfair to the man who has, in fact, shown remarkable grace and accountability in his relationships.
A life of reinvention
His separation from Reena Dutta, his first wife and the mother of his two children (Junaid Khan, who made his debut with Maharaj, and Ira Khan, a mental health advocate) in 2002, may have ended their marriage, but not their partnership as co-parents or collaborators — Reena continued to be closely involved in his career and was the producer of the Oscar-nominated Lagaan (2001). With Kiran Rao (they divorced in 2021), too, the public saw a rare example of a marriage that evolved into enduring friendship; the two continue to co-parent Azad, their son, and co-run the Paani Foundation. Their public statement post-separation was striking in its maturity and mutual respect.
Aamir Khan once re-shot scenes for Lagaan, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, because he felt the cricket swing wasn’t convincing enough.
Aamir’s journey through love reflects a man unafraid of vulnerability, willing to grow beyond social expectations, and committed to kindness in transitions that most would handle with far less transparency. Life can begin anew at 60 and everyone should be allowed new beginnings. Gauri, a seasoned creative professional with roots in design, fashion, and entrepreneurship, now works with Aamir’s production house. At 60, Aaamir shows us what it looks like to live a life of continual reinvention, with care, dignity, and a refusal to be boxed into someone else’s definition of ‘settled.’
Aamir entering into another relationship (he was briefly rumoured to be seeing Fatima Sana Shiekh, his Dangal co-star) has surprised some of his fans. But the real point of curiosity should be how Aamir surprises us with his roles, with the very idea of who he chooses to be at a given point. His process is the stuff of legend — script reading retreats, body transformations, last-minute edits. But unlike the method actors of the West who get lost in their characters, Aamir never entirely disappears. He’s always there, holding the reins, tinkering with structure, thinking about not just the scene, but the system.
The method in his movies
At the press meet, Aamir also spoke about Sitaare Zameen Par, a spiritual sequel of sorts to his 2007 directorial Taare Zameen Par, which releases in December this year. Set within a sports drama framework and inspired by Javier Fesser’s Spanish film Champions (2018), it promises to push the envelope further; Aamir stars alongside Genelia Deshmukh. “The idea is ten steps ahead,” he said. Taare Zameen Par, a film about a dyslexic child (a brilliant Darsheel Safary), functions just as much as a meditation on parenting, pedagogy, and emotional negligence. Khan’s character enters only midway through, but the camera gives him the moral centre. By directing the film himself (albeit after creative disagreements with Amole Gupte, who later made Stanley Ka Dabba), Aamir ensured it was also a statement of intent — a redefining of what mainstream cinema could be.
Also read: Shah Rukh Khan: The King of Bollywood who wears humanity like a second skin
He also confirmed that a sequel to Raj Kumar Santoshi’s Andaz Apna Apna is being developed — a return to that cult 1994 comedy in which he played Amar, the vain, idiotic charmer, with unflappable absurdity. The superhit film had become a generational favourite. Recreating that magic in today’s world of punchy comedies and fast laughs will mean that Aamir will have to reconfigure himself. But that’s precisely what Aamir is after, in film after film. In June this year, he will be seen in Lahore 1947, a partition-era drama directed by Santoshi and starring Sunny Deol and Preity Zinta (returning after a long hiatus). Produced by Aamir, this one seems to tap into his interest in big, sprawling historical films.
Aamir Khan has used the apparatus of fame not to elevate his own image, but to smuggle in ideas that a more populist actor might have buried.
Aamir’s ‘perfectionism’ is no myth — it is both his blessing and his Achilles heel. He once re-shot scenes for Lagaan, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, because he felt the cricket swing wasn’t convincing enough. He reworked Rang De Basanti’s ending because test audiences didn’t respond. He’s a producer who knows his lighting and a performer who will sit through 300 auditions for a child actor’s role. His method isn’t just in acting — it’s in thinking. In how he builds narratives. In how he curates moral dilemmas and then plays both sides.
The paradox of Aamir’s stardom
The paradox at the centre of Khan’s stardom is that he never quite believed in the seductions of stardom itself. He has used the apparatus of fame not to elevate his own image, but to smuggle in ideas that a more populist actor might have buried. Rajkumar Hirani’s PK (2014) is a case in point: a broad, sometimes clumsy satire on organised religion that managed to draw large audiences into a conversation that few mainstream Hindi films dared to enter.
That’s also what made Satyamev Jayate — his social-awareness TV show that ran from 2012 to 2014 — such a crucial extension of his screen persona. At a time when mainstream media was beginning to be starved of nuance and objectivity, Aamir turned his own image into a form of ethical capital. He stopped being an entertainer and became something closer to a narrator of India’s failures — quietly scandalising the political class by bringing honour killings, female foeticide, caste violence, medical malpractice, and sexual abuse into drawing rooms on Sunday mornings.
It was Aamir’s attempt at being a national conscience. Sitting in the centre of a minimalist set, with water at the ready and eyes full of tears, Aamir asked India to look inward. The show was often critiqued for being performative, but its impact was undeniable. Laws were discussed. Assemblies responded. Social change, however glacial, had found a new, primetime face. Khan was both actor and moderator, using his credibility to make space for real people’s pain. Unlike most celebrity activism, which works by amplifying causes through Instagram or token appearances, Satyamev Jayate was a narrative project. It showed that Aamir’s commitment to storytelling extended far beyond the film set.
A restless citizen-artist
For many of us who came of age in the 1990s, our first memory of Aamir Khan traces back to films like Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992), in which he played the boyish charmer who cried, raced, fell in love, and grew up all in one film. There was something vulnerable about him then — a slight figure with eyes too earnest for Bombay’s flashbulb dreams. We didn’t want him to be perfect. We wanted him to win. Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar in particular remains etched in memory. It captured sibling rivalry, class divides, adolescent love, and the transformation of a boy into a man. Aamir’s Sanjay was lazy, flawed, and selfish. But when he rose — pedalling through the final race, defying odds and taunts and history — it felt personal.
Later, Aamir would go on to reinvent himself. In films like Hirani’s 3 idiots (2009) and Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai (2001; he played Rancho, an unconventional, free-thinking college student, at 44, and made the character every bit realistic) marked the beginning of a new Aamir Khan — urban, aware, understated. As Akash, he brought comic timing, and a kind of modern male sensitivity that Bollywood was only just beginning to explore. Playing Akash, the sarcastic, emotionally stunted man-child who hides vulnerability under layers of wit, Aamir, in his mid-thirties then, made audiences believe he was still stuck somewhere between boyhood and the slow, necessary grief of growing up.
The film, with its urban coolness and quiet emotional depth, became shorthand for a generation figuring out how to carry friendship and fear into adulthood. Aamir, with his goatee and smugness slowly giving way to sincerity, felt like a pivot point — not just in his career, but in the emotional vocabulary of the Hindi film hero.Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti (Paint Me Saffron, 2006) took that arc further, merging politics with pop culture, resistance with friendship. It was a clever casting move — Aamir playing a man who wakes up to history and chooses protest over passivity.
Rang De Basanti spoke to a post-liberalisation generation beginning to fathom its own disillusionment. It detonated the vocabulary of Dil Chahta Hai altogether. It showed Aamir-as-catalyst, a man moving from disaffection to fury, from youthful irreverence to political reckoning. DJ, the character he plays, begins the film allergic to ideology and ends it as a martyr — an arc that mirrors, perhaps more than any other, Aamir’s own journey from charming actor to restless citizen-artist.
Aamir Khan reinvented himself in Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hai (2001) and Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 idiots (2009).
Rang De Basanti was a howl, a provocation, a referendum on apathy. And Aamir’s presence at its centre gave it weight. He allowed anger to build, slowly, like a wave coming to claim everything he once held at a safe distance. If Dil Chahta Ha was a film about staying young, Rang De Basanti was about what happens when you can’t afford to anymore. There is a pattern here: Aamir tends to gravitate toward roles that reframe the viewer’s moral compass. In Nitesh Tiwari’s Dangal, he plays a rigid patriarch whose love is expressed through brutal discipline. These are not likable characters. But Khan understands something fundamental: that Hindi cinema doesn’t need likability from its stars, it needs clarity, it needs a stand. And few actors are as clear about their intent as he is.
Missteps, and legacy
But not everything Aamir has done worked. Vijay Krishna Acharya’s Thugs of Hindostan (2018), for all its budget and bravado, turned out to be a bloated misfire. Meant to be a pirate epic, it ended up being a shipwreck of tones and expectations. Aamir’s choice to play Firangi, a fast-talking, morally slippery anti-hero, was bold on paper but incoherent in execution. The film flopped, and the backlash was swift. Critics pounced on him, memes proliferated.
Laal Singh Chaddha (2022) was a more poignant attempt — a Hindi remake of Forrest Gump, positioned as a sweeping take on Indian history through the eyes of an innocent man. But it suffered both from the burden of comparison and a strangely flattened emotional register. Aamir’s performance felt over-rehearsed, the quirks too deliberate. The movie had its moments that shone, but something was missing. It didn’t land the way Taare Zameen Par had, or even PK. Perhaps it tried too hard to be meaningful.
And yet, that’s what makes Aamir Khan an anomaly. At 60, he’s not phoning it in. He isn’t just coasting on nostalgia. He’s producing films, headlining them, taking risks. He’s thinking about comedy, about sports dramas, about stories set in 1947 and sequels that shouldn’t exist but just might work. He’s not retiring into legend. He’s still chasing something. In an industry that measures men by the youth of their skin and the virality of their gym selfies, Aamir, with silver in his hair but mischief still gleaming in his eye, seems almost like a ghost from another era, or perhaps a time traveller from a future where actors are not brands and films are not fast food.
His interviews are often awkward, punctuated by long pauses and uncertain laughs. He speaks slowly, with the gravitas of someone who does not trust words until they’ve been considered from all sides. He is not suave, not quick, not easy. He has never endorsed a fairness cream. He has never anchored — or participated in — an award show. He refused the national award when he felt it was inappropriate. He has stayed away from camps and cliques, floating above the frenzied clannish system of the Hindi film industry, where ‘nepo kids’ find it easier to get a foothold than an outsider, no matter how talented he/she is. He has allowed himself to age onscreen, allowed his face to bear the weight of years, the sag of effort, the honesty of time.
At 60, Aamir Khan doesn’t need to act anymore. But since has still got plenty of game left in him, he will, perhaps not because the audience is demanding it, but because somewhere in a studio, he is already planning another immersion, another long solitude, another attempt at making sense of a world through the lens of fiction. Perhaps not to impress, not to entertain, but because, even after all this time, he still believes cinema can matter. That, in the end, is his legacy. Not the stardom, not the box office figures, but the sheer, improbable, stubborn belief that this thing we call moviemaking can still be worth the effort.
