Back in 1999, at the 44th Filmfare Awards, when a nerve-wrecked Karan Johar stepped up on the dais to receive his maiden Best Director honour for his 1998 directorial debut Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, he got the entire auditorium — and the entire nation watching the broadcast on Doordarshan — hooked to his speech. “Ever since I’ve dreamt of being here in front of all the people that I’ve grown up watching, I figured if I wanted my dream to come true, I’d have to be a compere. Because I never really thought I’d turn director,” he said.As he concluded his acceptance speech — a self-admittedly rehearsed script rendered with the command of a professional compere — the hearty applause was directed at not only his monumental achievement, but also his refreshing eloquence. He wasn’t the age-old director with a hangover from his pind, but a new-age one raised in the increasingly cosmopolitan South Mumbai. He was also not just a filmmaker good at calling the shots on set, but also a well-rounded personality, aptly representative of a generation embracing liberalisation.A new millennium, a new talk showAt the turn of the new millennium, as Star World came to India, the channel was scouting for a face of its new chat show. The vibe was more irreverent and casual, and not Oprah-like as was the case with the reigning talk show queen, Simi Garewal. So, the obvious turned out to be a much younger, a more with it Karan Johar. Of course, unlike Garewal, he was a director, and that too one who’d just started out, with two blockbusters under his belt. He was warned by many well-wishers not to dilute the “dignity” of a filmmaker. But Karan later admitted he’s glad he didn’t listen to them, and went on to host a chat show — which literally and symbolically — became synonymous with him.Koffee with Karan was no Rendezvous with Simi Garewal. It wasn’t just candid, but often explosive. Not just ruminative, but also catty. And instead of being soothing and laid back like sipping tea in pristine porcelain, it was steamy, frothy, and stimulating like an espresso shot. To his credit, Karan has kept it brewing for eight seasons (and counting) and over 22 years. Even when the guests are more guarded and PR-trained, Karan has kept the mood of the show organic. Karan Johar on Koffee with Karan. (Photo: Jio Hotstar)He didn’t just dent the perception of the austere Indian filmmaker through his turn as the irreverent troublemaker, but also cut across demographics to venture into the more mainstream streams of Indian television. After hosting the one-off dance hunt Say Shava Shava alongside his former rival talk show host Simi Garewal in 2008, Karan made his presence felt even in the primetime slots of the Hindi GEC channels in 2012.As a judge on Jhalak Dikhla Jaa alongside Madhuri Dixit and Remo D’Souza, he brought the dramatic fluency he’d mastered on Koffee with Karan, this time in another, more accessible language. And the riffing with his co-judges on India’s Got Talent — Kirron Kher and Malaika Arora (read: “Toodles!”) — made for content so malleable that it fit as well on television as on Instagram Reels. Karan didn’t just treat this expansion into the Hindi GECs as a cash-grabbing exercise, but also his personal creative release (remember how liberated he felt when he takes to the dance floor on Jhalak Dikhla Jaa) and a place of inspiration (he hailed India’s Got Talent as a thriving ground for budding talent across performance arts).Hosting duties continue to roll for Karan Johar in all shapes and sizes, from the scale of Traitors on Amazon Prime Video and Bigg Boss OTT season 1 (he and his mother Hiroo Johar are self-professed avid buffs) to the intimacy of playing the matchmaker on Netflix India reality show What The Love! and donning the love guru hat on late night radio show Calling Karan. “When you are not in a relationship of your own, you do have the bandwidth to analyse other people’s relationships. But you know, how they say a great acting coach may not be a great actor. So I may be a good adviser, but that doesn’t mean I’m great in a relationship,” Karan told this writer in a 2018 interview.Story continues below this ad Karan Johar in The Traitors.His world is a red carpetIt’s certainly the shroud of privacy Karan has maintained over his love life that’s also sustained his mystique in a saturated world where he, as per confessions time and again, is explicitly everywhere. So much so that Kareena Kapoor joked on Koffee with Karan that her mother Babita Kapoor can spot Karan Johar as soon as she switches on the television. Karan has embraced that multifaceted, multihyphenate persona with aplomb. The ‘diva’ image in this rather unconventional Punjabi munda is also shaped by his facility for high fashion.Though he kicked off his career officially as an Assistant Director to Aditya Chopra on his 1995 blockbuster romantic comedy Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, that film also launched yet another career for the filmmaker-to-be. As recently as his debut on the Met Gala red carpet earlier this month, Karan credited Shah Rukh Khan for his secondary fashion career. All set to relocate overseas to study fashion, Karan was roped in by Chopra to help out on his directorial debut, where he ended up grooming and styling the lead actor. That led to an enduring association of Karan not only as Shah Rukh’s frequent director, but also his go-to stylist on films like Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), Duplicate (1998), Mohabbatein (2000), Veer-Zaara (2004), and Main Hoon Na (2004).It also helped that Karan’s sprawling movies reflected the same brand of glamour, shaped in large part by Manish Malhotra, that eventually became his personal style statement in real life. But the filmmaker, who began with monochromes dominated largely by all-black suits, admitted that his turn to fur, candy-coated colours, and drapes was in fact an armour to protect his deep insecurities linked to his physique. Karan has detailed in his 2016 memoir An Unsuitable Boy that since he was bullied at school for being a “pansy”, he took classes for grooming, including fashion, body language, and even voice training to sound “more like a man.” With renewed confidence and assurance in his own skin, Karan has now returned to the familiar monochromes, except the occasional Met Gala-like red carpe, when he goes all out, but not without compromising on his core, classy style. Like fellow filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Karan has also kept the visual, kaleidoscopic extravagance to his movies, and retained the blacks for his personal wardrobe.The occasional actorThe change in Karan Johar’s pop-culture perception is also reflected through the few appearances he’s made on the big screen. Though his career began with playing the sidekick oddball in Anand Mahendroo’s 1989 TV show Indradhanush and SRK’s pal Monty in DDLJ, the syntax of his acting gigs changed completely post his arrival on Koffee with Karan. His cameos in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion (2008) and Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance (2009) presented him as a suave starmaker who owns the front row to the fashion and film industry. Anurag Kashyap milked this persona to cast him as the flamboyant Parsi media mogul Kaizad Khambatta in his 2015 period crime drama Bombay Velvet.Story continues below this adAlthough the fate of that film’s box office put a nail into the coffin of his acting career, Karan maintains that he’s still open to acting offers. While he doesn’t take the liberty to cast himself in any of the movies bankrolled by his banner Dharma Productions, he’s shown that he’s still got it in a show like Aryan Khan’s The Ba***ds of Bollywood last year. Just watch him have a moment grooving to “Koi Mil Gaya” from his directorial debut when he’s assured that despite the casting changes, his next “will always be a Karan Johar film.” Karan Johar played the antagonist in Bombay Velvet.Internet’s favourite punching bagBut unlike other filmmakers who became successful actors, like Farhan Akhtar and Anurag Kashyap, Karan Johar’s relevance also stems from his alternate image as controversy’s favourite child. Ever since Kangana Ranaut dubbed him as “the flag-bearer of nepotism”, with that narrative picking steam after the death of Sushant Singh Rajput in 2020, Karan hasn’t heard the end of it for eight years now. Every nepo baby’s lackluster performance is traced back to his mighty misfires, even though he continues to introduce new voices and faces who have no remote connection with the film industry.Also Read — ‘Nobody wants to copy Kareena or Alia anymore’: Karan Johar says Bollywood no longer sets trendsKaran has deleted his X account and even admitted to seek therapy to combat the incessant trolling targeted at him and his kids. But he maintains that he can still process love or hate in abundance, but can’t get himself to deal with indifference. But given the trajectory of his directorial career, Karan need not worry about that. Yes, he’s constantly challenged the way a filmmaker was conventionally perceived in India, but he’s managed to ground all the other dimensions of his personality — host, fashionista, actor, provocateur — in relevance only because he’s enjoyed 100% success as a writer-director. Right up till his latest directorial, Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani three years ago, Karan has kept indifference at bay because of relentless visibility, but also because he’s never showed the same indifference to what got him that visibility in the first place.