Meet Soha Ali Khan, the author

Book: The perils of being moderately famous; Publisher: Penguin Books; Price: Rs 299; Pages: 210 

There is nothing extraordinary about this book, no big tragedy or drama or larger than life event. Thankfully, there are no boring moments either. Easy to read, with plenty of anecdotes, it’s the kind of book that you can finish reading in one go. And though it doesn’t go too deeply into anything, it does allow readers a peek into some important facets of Soha Ali Khan’s life - taking care to always keep a distance.  

The author has neatly divided the book into eight chapters as if dividing her life into eight episodes for a web-series, each chapter/episode dealing with one important event or phase in her life. The first chapter, ‘Big shoes, small feet’, begins with Khan explaining the title, ‘The perils of being moderately famous’ - it had to do, she confesses, with being asked, ‘Are you famous?’, a few times - before moving on to write about her paternal family - Pataudi. 

“Had the privy purses and princely titles not been abolished in 1971, my official title would have been Nawabzadi Soha Ali Khan of Pataudi and Bhopal,” she writes. The ‘Bhopal’ in the title is a tribute to her paternal grandmother, Sajida Sultan, the second daughter of the last ruling nawab of Bhopal. This chapter is about the history of her family and speaks at length about her father Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi and his remarkable journey in cricket. She shines a light on his personality, on how he was frugal with words and money, and how she tricked him into permitting her to visit a friend or market. In the following chapter, she establishes her Bengali connections, and how she’s related to Rabindranath Tagore. There’s even a relationship chart to explain the genealogy.

The book then swiftly moves to a topic that the entire nation wants to know about - the lives of ‘Saifeena’, as the media calls her brother Saif Ali Khan and his wife Kareena Kapoor and their son Taimur. 

One chapter is devoted to her life at Oxford University, which reads at once pretty ordinary and also very interesting. With no one to look after her, Soha, who’d had a sheltered and privileged upbringing, had to do her own chores; survived on coke and Twix chocolates; and ‘hibernated’ to avoid the cold. Her college life appears similar to everyone's - a love interest, assignments finished at the last moment and an impromptu hitchhiking trip from Oxford to the Eiffel Tower. 

The fun continues in the following chapter which describes her life after she first came back to Mumbai and worked in a bank as a management associate. Khan writes self-deprecatingly about how she had to remind herself that SLB was not Sanjay Leela Bhansali but Securities Lending and Borrowing, and PC was P Chidambaram, not Priyanka Chopra. She quit the job, as everyone knows, to become an actor, like her mother and brother, beginning her career a Bengali film titled

'Iti Srikanta', followed by'Dil Maange More!!!' in Hindi. 

The rest of the chapters continue the story of her life - another backpacking trip with college friends, more anecdotes about people she met, things she did, her love life and her daughter Inaaya. In the chapter titled ‘It’s complicated’, she writes in some detail about her love life so far before confessing that the account might annoy her husband before moving on to describe her relationship with actor Kunal Khemu whom she met on the sets of movie ‘Dhoondte Reh Jaoge’ and married a few years ago. In a reflective tone, she writes about what worked and what didn’t in her relationships so far and ends with the dictum - ‘Aim for love. Always aim for love. Let the rest be noise’. 

The book has a lot of pictures - sweet, fun pictures from her childhood, her parents’ wedding, her father as a young cricketer, her wedding, family vacations and her daughter Innaya.