'No point pretending we don't drink' - Saif

Saif Ali Khan's been going through a bit of a thing lately. You can see it, right there where his eyebrows meet the bridge of his nose. There's been some looking back. There's been some looking in. At times, he looks like he's squinting into the sun, even though he's sitting behind his desk in the tree-shaded study of his production company, Illuminati Films.

"I used to be a student of art history," he explains, as I scan the titles on the hundreds of spines that fill the bookcase behind him, "and I've been trying to revisit things I wasn't concentrating on when I was in school."

He's looking at me, but not looking at me. "I understand that with art," he says, thinking aloud, "every major movement, every generation is finding problems, reinventing itself, and finding itself constrained." His pupils dart left and right, reading a forgotten textbook in the air. Then, suddenly, he makes eye contact: "Czanne, for example. What do you know about him?"

Saif turned 44 this past August, but it would be unfair to say this cycling back to his school days in England is some kind of midlife crisis. The more time you spend with him, the more you realize he's just an introspective dude. Even if he were having a midlife crisis, what would be the signs? Saif buying himself a new Beemer for his birthday wouldn't portend what it would if your Maruti-driving dad did that. This guy's the 10th Nawab of the erstwhile princely state of Pataudi for Chrissakes, having recently wrested control of his family's palace from the Neemrana hotel group. Compensating for age with material objects doesn't work for Saif Ali Khan the way it does for you and me. Or your pops.

Our man's acted in 50-plus films over 22 years, he's heard every opener a reporter could think of. My inevitable attempt at an unexpected opening was to ask him why he chose to name his production company after an 18th-century Bavarian secret society, whether or not he runs the Illuminati's Bombay chapter, you know, loosen him up like that, but he saves me the trouble of having that approach tank. What he really wants to talk about, seriously, is Paul Czanne.

"You used to be an artist, right?" he asks me. "So while you're here, let me pick your brain."

This is the first celebrity interview I've conducted where the subject has shown evidence of some counter-background research. If this is his unexpected opening, then touch.

"People who've written only paragraphs on other artists have written pages about Czanne," says Saif, reading the air again, "but what was so special about him? Why couldn't anyone else have done [what he did]?"

What, steamed out of Impressionism and laid the tracks for Picasso and Matisse? I give him a long-winded answer about the dialectics of 20th-century European painting and patronage, how in Czanne's time as much as now, ticking down the list of what constitutes a legend, talent factors relatively low compared to the spooky vicissitudes of the creative industrial complex. There is no straight answer.

"Interesting," he nods. "Very interesting."

This pleasant surprise aside - and as happy as we both are for not rolling out the subject/reporter rhetoric for his latest film project - the content of our conversation isn't what's truly interesting here. What's interesting is that this highly travelled, highly educated elder statesman of the Hindi film industry, someone who should be jaded, or at least bored by just about everything, is, at this stage of life, so full of curiosity.

Periodically, the conversation does slalom around turning points in his career, like landing parts in benchmark films like Dil Chahta Hai and Omkara: "You know, when history happens, sometimes it's easy to recognize. Sometimes... it's not [?] "

He inflects the sentence upwards at the end, quizzical, but not like a Valley Girl or an Australian, it's like he's observing his thoughts turn into words as they waft out of his mouth.

"There's so much out there," he says. "To know. To learn. It's so frightening. It's confusing sometimes."

He's been going through a bit of a thing lately.

But if this isn't a traditional midlife crisis- he hasn't run off and got a new piercing or a Ghajini haircut or anything like that - then what is it? Renaissance is too grand a term. Self-reflection is too pedestrian. It's like, I don't know, he woke up sometime post-40, asked himself "Is this as good as it gets?", and decided to undergo an internal audit.

Besides proffing himself through his old art history syllabus, he tells me he's been reading Arundhati Roy's The Annihilation of Caste, a quester book called Beyond Monotheism, as well as plodding through the first hundred pages of Don Quixote and going Gonzo in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, to which he asks, "What the hell was that book about?"

Aside from taking an unofficial second crack at art history, Saif's also a couple of years into his second round of nuptials. "I wish I had the mind of a 40-year-old and the body of a 20-year-old," he sighs.

Midlifers of any social strata could relate to that feeling, but when someone like Saif suggests something as easy-going as "you should come over for dinner some time and meet the wife," it takes a moment to register that the wife he speaks of isn't your average aunty, it's Kareena Kapoor, one of the most bankable starlets in Bollywood. And yet, dining at the Khan residence and having Kareena serve generous, "you're too skinny" sized helpings of mutton curry onto my plate, there's not much of the movies about her, she's just a gracious host and a nice lady. But out there, on their last trip to Dubai for example, Saif says Kareena buying a pair of jeans attracted "2000 people, following us, taking pictures. She just accepts that people are there and forgets about it." He says it reminded him of being on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles and "seeing Avril Lavigne being mobbed by paparazzi", walking down the sidewalk looking "like a giant walking disco ball."

At this point you might be tempted to scream "j'accuse!", point a finger at old Saif for pulling a typical midlife boner by marrying a beautiful girl a decade his junior. But he runs good lines for that too: "Being married to a girl younger than I am, I get a different take. I don't get stuck in my place. Sometimes, she says to me That's over', and I'm like No it's not!' and then I'm like, Oh my god, it is.' So it's like having binocular vision... It's like a Venn diagram."

"But," he's quick to assure me, "I still have to tell her there are certain classic things that I liked when I was 20 and still like in my forties, like The Doors."

Fine. But there's another bit of twenties vs forties behaviour I have to broach: Saif introducing his fist to someone's face at Wasabi, a five-star restaurant in the Taj Hotel a couple of years ago, an incident after which the defendant took his broken nose to the Colaba police, saying that when he asked Mr Khan's table to bring the noise down, he was told, "If you want peace, go to a library". Then he was suckerpunched.

Saif is fidgety but forthright: "I could tell you that it was late at night, that the restaurant was open only for us, that we weren't making much noise and some people can be very annoying. But there's no need. It was a fight and it was a very juvenile thing.

"I could have perhaps made a case for this in my twenties," he says, "but not in my forties. I'm incredibly embarrassed by the whole thing because, due to our efficient judicial process this is going to go on for 25 years. It's not cool and it will never happen again, but the point is that when I look back at my life, sure, I've messed up once or twice. I'm okay with that."

"Do you have any particular techniques for dealing with what the media writes about you?" I ask.

"Not really, no" he says. "But there comes a time when you have to stop googling yourself."

Not long ago, laying on the rooftop terrace of the Pataudi Palace in present-day Haryana, Saif Ali Khan was staring up at the stars. He was thinking about his grandfather and his father, the 8th and 9th Nawabs of Pataudi, both Oxford-educated international cricketers, pondering the era that ended with his father's title being abrogated in 1971. He reveres these men who've left him with such a legacy to live up to, but that night he was feeling a bit overwhelmed, feeling like he might not deserve to have inherited this palace, being as he was the last in a line "brought up in Raj English, foreign-service schools to then go work for the Empire somewhere."

"But with the end of all that," says Saif, sitting in his study, squinting at a space somewhere above my right shoulder, "this kind of education became less relevant."

It takes me a little while to put it together, but maybe this has something to do with Saif being so fascinated by Paul Czanne, a creative man living at the end of an epoch and waiting for a new one to begin, a man whose legendary reputation would depend more on how a changing society would categorize him than how his work would change society. Like Czanne, like every public figure shelved in the collective memory since, Saif Ali Khan will be categorized for posterity without being sought for his opinion or approval.

Perhaps Saif feels he's between creative periods, or realizing that whatever his next creative step is, he wants it to be something over which he can exert more control than he could his acting career. And if there's any truth to that, then it's possible this internal audit thing he been going through latley has more to do with the library at the Pataudi Palace than any of the art history he's reading.

Saif's father, Mansoor Ali Khan may be remembered as India's greatest ever cricket captain, but he's wasn't a jock. He had a chronic reading habit, and before his passing in 2011, devoured everything from Persian poetry to hunting manuals. Now that the palace is back in the family, the first thing to be done is renovate, restore and restock the library.

"I also want to make a library bar," says Saif with a smile, a big toothy thing I attempt to reciprocate, as I imagine myself in such a library, reclining on a domed leather sofa, absorbed in some Oscar Wilde first edition, the Irishman's eternal wit fortified with a single malt of an age that middles our epochs.

"It's against my mother's wishes," says Saif, "since Pataudi used to be a Muslim state, but come on, we can't just pretend we don't drink."

Most of the library's volumes were moved out of what the hotel would come to use as a dining room, and only about half the original stock will be making its way back onto their home shelves, but a restorer's been brought in to mend some of the original editions, and the rest of the shelf space will be rounded out with new acquisitions, a few of which Saif shows me after "dinner with the wife": a few first editions of Arthur Conan Doyle, a first-edition Milton - unf**kwithable stuff.

"Sure," Saif demures, "but there are better libraries everywhere in America."

"But this one's yours," I say.

"Exactly," he says.

If he wants peace, he'll go to a library.

When construction's done, there are plans to extend the renovative spirit beyond the palace walls to the 14,000 or so people in the vicinity, for whom an eye hospital has already been built. "I'm trying to process everything and radiate it..." Saif rolls his hands in front of his chest. "The most basic thing here is to be less selfish and share some cash."

Part of any internal audit is an accountability assessment, but if by now you still think philanthropy from a super-rich movie star with a deed to a royal palace is a midlife crisis with an asterisk, I won't be changing your mind. But consider this: even Paul Czanne was only afforded the time it took to become the legend he did thanks to a sizeable inheritance from his father.

I wonder what Czanne would make of this movie-star Nawab. How would the Father of 20th-century European Painting interpret the morning light speckled across the grounds of the 20th-century Pataudi Palace?

I wonder if Saif getting back into art history will ever lead to him offering something like a Pataudi Palace Art Residency. They've got a few spare bedrooms on hand. It must be a peaceful and inspiring place to paint. The library will have a bar.

If you're reading, Nawabji, consider this my application. I might just have to come out of artistic retirement for something like that.

Saif says Kareena buying a pair of jeans attracted "2000 people, following us, taking pictures. She just accepts that people are there and forgets about it.

V/s

Kareena's very good with crowds. That blind item doesn't make sense.

I know.

Most of her fans who met her say she's sweet. Anyways we might get the answer later on.

Saif grew up in that palace. But I think they lost a lot of their land (after their titles were abolished) and money and had to put the palace up for rent to a hotel company.

Saif recently was able to finally buy it back. Which is why he's really excited. It was a dream of his.

I do wish he would also evince an interest in more things Indian...and do something for Indian art...

He is hedonistic...but well read, well spoken and mostly fun to listen to.