Jubilee

Kareena Kapoor Khan is an anomaly in Hindi cinema, a female star who has remained a viable headliner over a quarter century.

- Raja Sen

Kareena Kapoor Khan couldn't dance. The only thing her mother, the actress Babita, with many a chartbuster under her belt, told her about making it in the movies was that "To be a number one star, you have to be a great dancer." She then said her daughter had two left feet—especially in comparison to her elder daughter, Karisma, an extraordinary dancer. Choreographer Saroj Khan agreed: "Yeh kaisi ladki hai jise haath pair chalaana nahin aata (What kind of a girl is this who can't move her hands and legs)?" Kareena, however, remained undeterred. She was, as the famous line in Jab We Met would attest many years later, her own favourite.

Kareena and I are both 44. I've been writing about film for over 20 years. Some of today's directors started reading my reviews while they were at school. I'm a veteran, yet Kareena—who looks luminous sitting across from me on a couch in a Bandra office, wearing a denim shirt and light blue jeans—has been at it far longer. When I was bunking Delhi University classes to play cricket, she was already hard at work on film sets. She knew what she wanted, early. "I was as old as (her son) Taimur, and he's seven-and-a-half," she says. "I knew that I wanted to be an actor."

Born into the Kapoor clan, where cinematic legacies are passed down as effortlessly as heirloom handbags, Kareena's path may have seemed preordained. Yet, even within Hindi cinema's first family, expectations were minimal—at least for the women. Kapoor girls didn't work in the movies, until older sister Karisma—whom she calls Lolo—sparked Kareena's fancy. "My inspiration has actually only been watching Lolo going to shoot, and me constantly not wanting to go to school, and wanting to just hang around on the set."