What makes Salman the coolest Khan

The first of a two-part special, celebrating the superstar who starred in the biggest Hindi hit ever, 2010's Dabbang.

You can tell a lot about a megastar by the way he throws his punch.

A Hindi film hero might routinely fell over seven with one blow, but each has their own approach. Aamir Khan, all bloodshot eyes and biceps rippling with the fury of thousands of killed wives to avenge, brings both physical intensity and a sense of inescapable irony to the picture.

Shah Rukh Khan, his every sinew straining with gargantuan effort, bellows like a wounded animal as he metamorphoses from charming lover to crazied aggressor.

The myth, then, is as self-contradictory as the man. The role Khan seems to fill, in fact, is that of the man-child, who thrives on indulgence, indulgence we now have to spare, being so frequently cynical the rest of the time.

Battling a cold valiantly, he takes turns blowing into a formerly white kerchief and wrapping it tightly around his knuckles, as if preparing for a street-fight.

Occasionally, when thinking hard, he absently bites into it, tugging it with its teeth as if insight can be sucked out of cotton.

When emphatic, he punches the air in front of his face, a phlegmatic pugilist jabbing at invisible, omnipresent opponents. "Nothing ever bothers me. Nothing."

He says every part of the public persona is inaccurate, but he can't be bothered to go about telling people what to think.

Son of Salim Khan, one-half of Bollywood's most celebrated screenwriting pairs Salim-Javed, Salman confesses a desire to direct. "I always wanted to direct. I really thought that I would, somewhere, make a good director," he mumbles softly, before saying that he does make creative suggestions to directors he works with, but backs off because it is, eventually, their call.

"You don't have cinema till the time you don't have a story. You have a story to tell and you shoot the film with the worst technique, and that film will do well. And you have the best technique in the world, but the lousiest script, you can do anything you want to do, but that film will not work."

"Well yes, but the script is not usually made the way it was. They start improvising, they start changing, they get scared, yeh bhi daal do, woh bhi daal do," he says.

So what went wrong, then, with Veer, a film he wrote and produced earlier this year, a catastrophic failure?

"First of all," he insists, "Nothing went wrong with it at all, at the box office. But in my head, I felt a lot of things went wrong. I wanted to shoot for 18 more days."

"Painting?" he grins. "Painting is a big jhol (loosely translated as a con job). I wanted to buy three paintings for my house. The artist charged me a lot of money, and they didn't turn out the way I wanted them to turn out. So I thought, 'Let's try.' So I started painting, started getting good at it. I was fortunate to find my own style in the first five-and-a- half, six months. Artists take the longest time to find their way to say what they want to say."

Salman's paintings are sold at exhibitions with the money going into a charitable trust, and that's clearly what fuels his fire.

"So I'm getting better and better at it, and the money's going to a good cause," he says.

He isn't under many delusions about why his paintings sell. "When somebody's buying an artist's work, two things are important: One is the amount of experience that he has, and two is a business plan: How long is he going to be there? After that, we're going to make so much money because we've gotten his art, and after he's dead, he obviously can't paint anymore. So," he pauses, briefly sounding alarmingly morbid, "they make money."

"Here, how many paintings am I going to make anyway? I'm an actor. I paint when I find the time," he says, explaining that it's usually at night.