Salman Khan and the Privilege of Being Seen

I love to decode the epimemetic factors shaping the Indofuturist zeitgeist. Sometimes, the most revealing material is a superstar explaining why he no longer needs to listen to the people whose profession helps others become visible.

Salman Khan can afford to wave away a publicist. The newcomer waiting for someone to return an email has rather less room for that swagger. His reported exchange with Karan Johar raises a question bigger than personal preference: what happens when the already famous mistake their freedom from dependence for a model everyone else should follow?

In their Koffee with Karan conversation, Karan contrasted an earlier sense of fraternity with actors’ present dealings with PR. Salman said he continued to make his own decisions and resisted instructions from publicity professionals, invoking his decades in the industry. That establishes his position on taking advice. It does not establish that he has prevented newcomers from getting work.

My criticism is of the attitude and the hierarchy it risks reinforcing. From where I sit, the dismissal sounds myopic. Experience may improve your judgement. It can also make you forget the advantages from which you exercise it.

Inherited access and the outsider’s climb

Salman is the son of Salim Khan, the celebrated screenwriter and one half of Salim-Javed. In today’s vocabulary, he is a nepo baby. That description does not explain away his longevity or his relationship with audiences. It does locate his beginnings inside an industry whose language and relationships were already part of his family’s world.

An outsider starts from a different position. A famous parent brings familiarity with the profession, even where it guarantees no particular role. An unknown performer may have to build recognition through auditions, independent work, social media and professional publicity. Their effort to become visible deserves consideration without the sneer.

Not every aspiring actor will become Salman’s protégé. Nor should anyone’s prospects depend on that blessing. A publicist can introduce a performer’s work to editors, arrange an interview and explain why a project merits attention. Hiring that expertise can be a practical attempt to get considered.

Publicity is one route, and its cost can exclude people too. I want more ways in, including independent coverage and meaningful opportunities to audition. Making newcomers embarrassed about promoting their work only adds another obstacle.

The people behind the cameras

The same respect should extend to the people carrying cameras outside premieres, airports and studios. The word paparazzi can conceal differences between a platform owner, a salaried camera operator and a freelancer chasing assignments. They do not necessarily share the same income, security or power.

Paparazzi crews can be stationed at airports for eight to ten hours a day and photographers responding to sightings with very little notice. That is labour, however glamorous the subject of the picture. The visibility business depends on people who wait, travel, carry equipment and deliver usable material.

The money shot is hard to come by in a crowded field. Competition rewards speed and novelty, and can encourage poor judgement. Understanding that pressure should make us more attentive to working conditions. It cannot excuse harassment, dangerous pursuit or sexualised images taken against someone’s wishes.

Salman deserves credit on that specific point. In his remarks on the show, he distinguished people choosing publicity from women who did not want intrusive photography and were uncomfortable with the camera angles. That concern is legitimate. Defending the dignity of photographers requires defending the dignity of the people they photograph too.

But professional standards should never become a pretext for treating an occupation as beneath us. A freelance photographer deserves ordinary courtesy. So does a junior publicist trying to do their job. Neither should have to possess a star’s wealth or social standing to be treated as a professional.

Salman and Karan inhabit a celebrity economy in which coverage helps keep familiar faces in circulation. Its value includes the flattering image, the interview and the repeated public encounter through which a name remains culturally present. No individual owes every photographer a pose. Equally, it is ungrateful to dismiss the wider labour that helps sustain the prestige from which established stars benefit.

This is the class contradiction I want to challenge. The person in front of the camera receives the glamour; the person holding it may be treated as an inconvenience. Looking down on that worker while enjoying the benefits of visibility is an elitist posture, whoever adopts it.

Who gets to be seen?

When personal connections are remembered fondly as fraternity, while professional efforts to build new connections attract suspicion, we should ask who was included in that earlier fraternity. An industry can feel wonderfully warm from inside the circle.

That is how a dismissive attitude can reinforce gatekeeping without anyone issuing a formal prohibition. Inherited familiarity looks natural. A newcomer’s deliberate attempt to be noticed looks manufactured. The established retain both attention and the authority to decide which routes to attention are respectable.

Salman, the freedom to refuse advice is yours. The responsibility to recognise your advantages should accompany it. Calling the broader publicity profession unnecessary would be short-sighted; treating its workers as lesser would be worse.

The next generation deserves routes to recognition beyond patronage. The people helping create that recognition deserve dignity, fair treatment and clear standards. A more generous industry would make room for both.

And then there is the benign poltergeist Salman described at home. Permit me one entirely unserious theory: perhaps it is the soul of a paparazzi photographer, still trying to get one decent shot of him and his family. Even in the afterlife, the poor fellow cannot get everyone to look at the camera.

Bhai, ek family photo, please. Some people are waiting an eternity.