🇮🇳 Karan Johar

He was born in Bombay in 1972 to producer Yash Johar and Hiroo Johar. His father's company, Dharma Productions, had been making films since 1976, but with only modest commercial success and a couple of celebrated misfires. Karan studied at Greenlawns and H. R. College, intended for a career in business or perhaps fashion, and found himself instead on the set of Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge in 1995, where he played a small role and quietly absorbed the architecture of the Yash Raj film. By the end of that shoot he had decided to direct.

His directorial debut, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), starred Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and Rani Mukerji and reset what a Hindi blockbuster could look like — saturated colours, university chapels, designer sweatshirts, a song about friendship that became a wedding standard. It became the highest-grossing Hindi film of the year and won the National Film Award for Best Popular Film. Johar was twenty-six.

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) made the template global. It pulled in three generations of Bachchans and Khans, opened in London simultaneously with Mumbai, and earned more than Rs 135 crore worldwide — a number that, for a Hindi film not yet specifically aimed at non-Indian audiences, was unprecedented. Its songs are played at Indian weddings on three continents two decades later, and the trolley scene with Amitabh Bachchan descending from a helicopter remains a meme.

He took over Dharma after his father's death from cancer in 2004 and turned it into the most consistently bankable studio in Hindi cinema. Under his leadership Dharma has produced more than seventy films, ranging from the candy-coloured (Student of the Year, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani) to the surprisingly heavy (Kapoor & Sons, Raazi, Brahmastra, Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani). He has launched the careers of Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan, Sidharth Malhotra, Janhvi Kapoor and Vicky Kaushal in major roles.

Koffee with Karan, his talk show on Star World and now Hotstar, has run since 2004 and is the closest thing the industry has to a confessional. He has been criticised for nepotism, for celebrating the same dozen families, and for hosting episodes that have ended careers as often as launched them. The 2017 episode in which actress Kangana Ranaut called him the flag-bearer of nepotism on his own couch reshaped the public conversation about Bollywood for years. He has, by his own admission, made enemies of nearly every outsider he has not financed.

He is openly part of, but cautious about, India's gay community. He came out indirectly in his memoir An Unsuitable Boy (2017) — written with journalist Poonam Saxena — and became a father in 2017 via surrogacy to twins Yash and Roohi, named after his late parents. He has not married. He has spoken in recent years about depression, panic attacks, and the public-facing exhaustion of being a sixty-hour-a-week personality.

His detractors call him glib and a courtier. His defenders point to the dozens of writers, directors and actors he has financed, protected and re-employed — Zoya Akhtar, Shashank Khaitan, Vasan Bala, Shakun Batra, Karan Tejpal — and to the simple fact that, more than any other producer in Hindi cinema since Yash Chopra, he has kept the Hindi industry alive through its hardest decade: the streaming disruption, the South Indian onslaught, the post-pandemic single-screen collapse, and the political pressures of the present moment.