“I’m a movie star, I’m 51 years of age, and I don’t use Botox as yet,” began Shahrukh Khan, setting the tone for his candid and frequently humourous TED Talk, filmed in April in Vancouver, Canada.

Khan, who is currently filming Imtiaz Ali’s untitled movie with Anushka Sharma, spoke about ageing, love, the proliferation of social media, and his failed superhero film, Ra.One (2011). He also had time to showcase the dance he claimed to have invented, the “lungi dance”. Sometime in 2017, Khan is also scheduled to host an Indian version of the popular TED Talks, called Nayi Soch.

Here are five highlights from Khan’s talk.

  1. “I was born in a refugee colony in the capital city of India, New Delhi. And my father was a freedom fighter. My mother was, well, just a fighter like mothers are. And much like the original homo sapiens, we struggled to survive. When I was in my early 20s, I lost both my parents, which I must admit seems a bit careless of me now.”
  2. “Yeah, and in that moment of realisation, I asked the most central and pertinent question to humanity and me: Do I need to fix my face? Really. I’m an actor, like I told you, a modern expression of human creativity. The land I come from is the source of inexplicable but very simple spirituality. In its immense generosity, India decided somehow that I, the Muslim son of a broke freedom fighter who accidentally ventured into the business of selling dreams, should become its king of romance, the “Badhshah of Bollywood,” the greatest lover the country has ever seen ... with this face. Yeah.”
  3.  “The internet happened. I was in my late 40s, and I started tweeting like a canary in a birdcage and assuming that, you know, people who peered into my world would admire it for the miracle I believed it to be. But something else awaited me and humanity. You know, we had expected an expansion of ideas and dreams with the enhanced connectivity of the world.We had not bargained for the village-like enclosure of thought, of judgment, of definition that flowed from the same place that freedom and revolution was taking place in. Everything I said took a new meaning. Everything I did — good, bad, ugly — was there for the world to comment upon and judge. As a matter of fact, everything I didn’t say or do also met with the same fate.”
  4. “So you may use your power to build walls and keep people outside, or you may use it to break barriers and welcome them in. You may use your faith to make people afraid and terrify them into submission, or you can use it to give courage to people so they rise to the greatest heights of enlightenment. You can use your energy to build nuclear bombs and spread the darkness of destruction, or you can use it to spread the joy of light to millions. You may filthy up the oceans callously and cut down all the forests. You can destroy the ecology, or turn to them with love and regenerate life from the waters and trees. You may land on Mars and build armed citadels, or you may look for life-forms and species to learn from and respect. And you can use all the moneys we all have earned to wage futile wars and give guns in the hands of little children to kill each other with, or you can use it to make more food to fill their stomachs with.”
  5. “The future you has to be like an ageing movie star who has been made to believe that there is a possibility of a world which is completely, wholly, self-obsessively in love with itself. A world — really, it has to be a you to create a world which is its own best lover. That I believe, ladies and gentlemen, should be the future you.”