I can never say Shah Rukh is a friend: Karan Johar

Shah Rukh makes an absolutely brilliant friend. This year has been very tough on him healthwise. One is hoping the new year brings him really good health!

His back gives him much more pain than he lets anyone know… His threshold to pain is so huge that he doesn't let anyone around him see what he is going through. His back pain is supposed to go away with time -- we hope that happens.

To me, Shah Rukh is a very spiritual person. If he honed that part of his personality he'd really be something. He is really God's good son. He knows the right things to say. He is very spiritual in a lot of ways. He has the right kind of spiritual path that he tells you about if he feels close enough to you.

I feel he has an extra kind of perception. If he works on it, he'd be psychic and spiritual. 

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In many ways, he is like therapy to me. He senses when I am down and out. He tells me this is bothering you even if I may appear completely normal. It makes you wonder how he sensed that. He has that kind of intuition. He is a wonderful human being.

These are qualities in Shah Rukh I have never discussed before.

I think he is a great provider. He provides very well for his wife, his children, his sister, his friends and for me definitely. He is in my life more as an elder than as an actor.  That's why I can never say Shah Rukh is a friend of mine. I can't backslap him or take him for granted because I respect him too much.

Actually, I give him the respect I give my father. I can never have a casual conversation with him. He is more like a spiritual influence. He is like a senior in my life, but if I need a friend then he makes a brilliant friend.

If you know him well you understand what he is saying, where he is coming from. In moments in my life where I have needed support, he has been there. Whenever there has been a crisis, he has been wonderful. He has always been a supportive presence through any crisis – whether it was an emotional crisis or related to health.

We are a single unit family -- just my mum, dad and me -- and we have very few people around us who we are close to. But when we do get close to someone, we depend on him or her emotionally.

My parents look on Shah Rukh as a son. It is not the overt kind of affection where one just says, 'You are like my son.' They genuinely mean it. There is genuine feeling there.

And Shah Rukh looks up to my father like he would his own. He has come really close to my parents -- he connects very well with them. He connects with my mum and dad at two different levels.

Both Gauri and he have become family for me. We have reached that kind of comfort zone with each other. I can walk into their house as if it were my own. It's not an ordinary closeness -- it's like an oneness.

Karan Johar talked to Lata Khubchandani about his close friend, Shah Rukh Khan, who celebrates his 38th birthday on November 2.

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