Key facts
- Pankaj Kapur recalls Shah Rukh Khan supplying samosas at NSD as a child
- SRK was ten years old at the time, per Kapur's account
- National School of Drama is where many top Indian actors trained
- Anecdote shared with The Indian Express
Long before the iconic poses and global stardom, Shah Rukh Khan was a ten-year-old boy supplying samosas to drama students. That is the vivid memory shared by Pankaj Kapur, one of Hindi cinema and theatre's most respected actors, in a conversation with The Indian Express.
Kapur recalled that as a young student at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, a young Shah Rukh Khan — whose father Meer Taj Mohammed Khan ran a canteen near the campus — would regularly bring samosas to the students. The anecdote places SRK at the heart of NSD's world even as a child, years before he would formally train in theatre and eventually take Bollywood by storm.
The National School of Drama has long been considered the crucible of Indian performing arts, producing talents like Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, and Pankaj Kapur himself. The idea that Shah Rukh Khan grew up in its orbit, supplying food to its students, adds an almost mythological quality to his journey from those corridors to becoming one of cinema's biggest global icons.
Pankaj Kapur's recollection is more than a charming trivia moment — it is a reminder of how deeply the culture of Indian theatre runs through Bollywood's biggest names, and how the roads to stardom are often paved in far more ordinary, intimate circumstances than the film industry's polished PR machinery would suggest.