Shah Rukh Khan is Delhi’s everyman

When Shah Rukh Khan spoke to the press on Thursday afternoon, I was in the studio. There was the usual hyper-excitement that usually involves a live, unscheduled event — ‘Why isn’t our frame ready?’ ‘We are getting the audio but the video line isn’t through!’ But all I could think of was one of Shah Rukh’s ads, the one where they show his early life, running after his school bus and growing up in the capital city of Delhi. As Shah Rukh parried accusations of having a Movie star Meltdown with the excuse that a) they did it first, so he was on the defensive and b) he only did it to protect his children, I was amused at how it reminded me of every other person I meet in my own city, Delhi. In these real life moments where he is either hitting Farah Khan’s husband or using choice expletives, he represents Everyman in Delhi.

Like maybe the next door neighbour. He may greet every other person with a Namaste but turns into Hulk every time he sees a car backing up in front of his house. In Delhi, people have literally killed over parking space so you think it’s perfectly reasonable when they threaten and follow up their threat by deflating your car tyres.

My middle-class colony often turns into the setting for a Tarantino movie when water shortage and heat turn people’s heads to mush. When a water tanker drew up to a nearby street a few summers ago, people who lived on the other side demanded that they be served first. So they got into an argument with the tanker driver. Sensing that their supply may be diverted, one gent quickly popped into his home and picked up a gun to make his argument a little stronger. Now if a normal person was facing him, they might have cowered and let the crazy person have his way and maybe called the cops from the safety of their home. But the true Delhiite, as one in the crowd was, just goes inside his home and picks up his hockey stick. No one was shot that day so maybe aggression neutralised aggression.

No one raises a brow about this in the city, really, because our papers are full of it. While the original Delhi boy Shah Rukh was explaining his colourful language, three other Delhi boys were chasing down senior judges on the road just because their car might have scratched their bikes. In retaliation, they threw bricks at the car and hit them and landed the judges in hospital. The police have now a convenient socio-pscychological explanation of this phenomenon — road rage.

And these incidents are meant to be on the rise in these summer months but what I can’t figure out is that Delhi isn’t the hottest place in the country. In places like Vijayawada the mercury hits much meaner levels, so why do only Delhiites suffer from this atrocious aggression? I’m no social scientist so I’m not even going to try and figure out what it is in our DNA that makes us so mean — why the bus driver feels the need to just cut into my lane and squash me even though he’s driving something 10 times bigger than mine, why the person driving behind me starts honking even though there are 10 seconds to go before the light turns green, and why people use MC-BCs so liberally, they’ve almost become terms of endearment in Dilli.

I’m from Delhi and I’ve grown up seeing this aggression every day, sometimes from my own husband, who till recently thought nothing of jumping out of his car and giving an earful to someone he thought was being aggressive without reason. The explanation was always the same: give it bigger, brasher and bolder than you get it. And it took him to put the SRK episode into perspective for me: you can take a boy of out Delhi, but not Delhi out of him.

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News On Twitter: @sunetrac l inbox@dnaindia.net