Five lesser known facts about director Kabir Khan

From Kabul Express to New York to Ek Tha Tiger, director Kabir Khan’s career graph has gone up, up and away since his first tentative steps into Bollywood. Khan began as a documentary film maker. He’s made one documentary on Subhash Chandra Bose and two on Afghanistan. In fact, Kabul Express drew upon his own experiences in that turbulent country. Since then, however, Khan’s filmography has been full masala. On 30th June, Khan is going to chat with journalist Indu Mirani in the third edition of The Boss Dialogues. You need to register for this event and seating is limited, so click here. Meanwhile, here’s some trivia about the director of the second highest-grossing Bollywood film of all time. [caption id=“attachment_907765” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Director Kabir Khan with Indu Mirani. Courtesy: Boss Dialogues.[/caption] Who do we need to thank for Kabir Khan turning to movies? His sister. Khan’s didn’t harbour any ambitions of becoming a filmmaker. When his sister asked him to pick up an application form for Jamia Millia University in Delhi, Khan picked up a form on a whim for himself. He went on to study Mass Communications at the university. One of Khan’s great loves is travelling. He jokes that one criterion upon which he decides where to shoot his next film is figuring out which country he wants to visit next. Before he became a filmmaker, Khan worked as a cinematographer on the documentary The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl in 2006. Khan worked with journalist Saeed Naqvi, shooting documentaries, at the start of his career. During that time, Khan travelled to about 60 countries with Naqvi. Some of his best memories from that time are of travelling in Bosnia, Morocco and Tahiti. Does the name Kabir Khan sound common to you? It did to an American visa officer. When Khan applied for an American visa, to shoot New York, he was told by the consul officer that his name was “too generic”. So it turned out that everyone had a visa except the director of the film! Finally, Aditya Chopra pulled a few strings to sort the matter out, so that Khan could join his crew.