​After a year-long courtship, Bidaai fame Sara Khan and actor-producer Krish Pathak took their relationship to the next level with a court marriage on October 6.

Soon after signing the papers, an emotional Sara shared, “The moment we started living together, I felt like Krish’s wife, but registering our marriage felt different altogether. I had goosebumps and butterflies in my stomach. He is everything I ever wished for in a partner. I guess when you wait patiently, the right person comes along. I feel like our connection goes beyond this lifetime.”

Sara and Krish now plan to celebrate their union with a grand wedding on December 5. Krish said, “Our court marriage was an intimate affair, but expect our December wedding to be full of dhamaka with lots of naach-gaana and celebrations.”

The couple’s love story began on a dating app a year ago. “I saw his picture and immediately felt a sense of belonging,” recalled Sara, adding, “We started chatting and met the next day. I told him upfront that I wasn’t looking for anything casual. I was ready to settle down.”

Krish, known for his roles in POW: Bandi Yuddh Ke and Yeh Jhuki Jhuki Si Nazar, and son of actor Sunil Lahri, who played Lakshman in Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan, added, “Ours is quite a Gen-Z story. Both of us were coming out of heartbreaks. I never saw myself as the marrying kind because I was raised by a single mother and didn’t grow up around the idea of marriage. Sara, on the other hand, had seen her parents’ strong bond and always wanted that kind of stability. When I came across her photo, I felt an instant pull. Meeting her changed everything, and I knew I didn’t want to let her go.”

Speaking about their interfaith marriage, Sara shared, “Love is the greatest faith of all. Every religion teaches us to love first, and that is what we believe in.”

Reflecting on her journey with Krish, she added, “I have grown so much in this relationship. I have made my share of mistakes in life, but Krish feels like my best decision. We are learning from each other every day, and this marriage is truly a partnership in every sense.”

Cultural differences aside, Sara Khan reveals working in the neighbouring country was an enriching experience
Letty Mariam Abraham (MID-DAY; September 13, 2017)

"Arts should not be mixed with politics," says Sara Khan, having just completed shooting for Pakistani show, Laikin. While ties continue to remain strained India and Pakistan, the actor says she received tremendous love in the neighbouring country. "A lot of reality gets lost with media intervention. The truth is far from what they show. The people I worked with were extremely warm to me."

An unusual love story, Laikin marks her second small screen outing in Pakistan after Bay Khudi. "The show explores romance between a pair of cousins. The love-hate dynamic between the two central characters has been captured beautifully," she says.

Khan’s tryst with Pakistani shows began early last year when she was signed on for Bay Khudi, after a casting agent spotted her in Sapna Babul Ka Bidaai and was impressed by her performance. It was well-timed for the actor who always wanted to be a part of Pakistani shows because of their "rich content". "It was my Nani’s wish that I do a show in Pakistan ever since she began watching Zindagi [the channel]," she smiles.

Her experience of shooting in the neighbouring country was similar to that back home, barring a stray incident, this time around.

"After the day’s shoot, I headed down to the hotel lobby to unwind, casually dressed in a pair of shorts. In Mumbai, nobody cares about your outfits. But, things are different there. Many people in the lobby were quite shocked by my choice of outfit. A unit hand then told me that people refrain from wearing shorts outside. I ran back to my room and changed immediately."

However, she is quick to add that she was also privy to some powerful, independent women. "The roles of channel head, director and additional directors were helmed by women. That was encouraging to me."

Neha Maheshwri (BOMBAY TIMES; April 7, 2017)

Neha Maheshwri (BOMBAY TIMES; December 31, 2016)

Celebrities defend cricketer Mohammed Shami after he was called `un-Islamic' for posting a picture of his wife in a gown
Divya Kaushik, Riya Sharma, Ismat Tahseen, Lasyapriya Sundaram and Neha Maheshwri (BOMBAY TIMES; December 30, 2016)

The TV actress, currently shooting for a Pakistani show, talks about her experience amid the tension brewing between the two nations
Neha Maheshwri Bhagat (BOMBAY TIMES; October 4, 2016)

Neha Maheshwri Bhagat (BOMBAY TIMES; July 2, 2016)

Autopsy Reveals Ligature Marks On Neck, Asphyxia
Nitasha Natu (THE TIMES OF INDIA; April 3, 2016)

Why have Bollywood's dancing girls ditched the Maximum City? The Hate Story 3 actress is perhaps the only one preferred on New Year's Eve
Avinash Lohana (MUMBAI MIRROR; December 31, 2015)

Arfeen Khan, doesn’t like to be called Hrithik Roshan’s life coach, but prefers the term ‘performance coach’
Manish Mishra (DNA; August 16, 2015)


When I ask him about being a life coach, he’s quick to correct me. “I’m not a life coach, I’m a performance coach which means I enhance mental performance. It can work in any area of your life while a life coach will probably give you an advice. In my opinion it’s overrated because who the hell knows about life? I can’t give you an advice on how to live life, but I can change your perspective on how you view the world. In a nutshell, what I do is, I change the way people view their world. I don’t give them solutions to specific problems. How can I do that?”

He explains with an example. “You make money, you lose money. It happens all your life. I can bet you a million dollars that your belief system is about money. You may have some past memories attached to it that are negative so whenever you’re making abundant wealth, your brain says get rid of it.” So what Arfeen does is, he tweaks and changes that perspective. “Once I got a cocaine addict and in four hours, I got him rid of his addiction. I just take their perspective and I show them what could happen if they carry on. They’ll change. I’m more of a performance coach.”

‘If your life is a mess, deal with it’
“I was young and ambitious and I knew I was intelligent. but when it came to exams, I’d flunk every time. I’d think, ‘What am I going to do with my life? I don’t have the education and the background’. I thought to myself, ‘I’m not dumb, I’m fairly intelligent’. After I failed in my exams, my father asked ‘What are you going to do with your life in the next five years?’ I thought to myself, ‘There’s got to be something, there’s got to be a way for me to become popular’. I started researching and I came across a few development programmes.”

He wanted to take charge of his life. Then he came across few behavioural sciences like Neural Linguistic Programming and mastered them. “I would go to someone with a phobia and they would get rid of their phobia like that. I would meet someone not confident of public speaking and fix it. When I applied it to myself, I started a business, when I was 20 years old and in two years, I was financially free, I was driving a Ferrari, with a complete turnaround in personality because I changed myself. But then, what happens is, I make the money and within the next few years, I’m broke. Because when you make the money quickly you do tend to blow it too quickly. I was really down and out. I discovered that all the successful people in the world who are happy, know how to manage their emotions. They don’t believe that life is about positive thinking which I don’t believe by the way, which I think is a total waste of time. If your life is a mess, it’s a mess, deal with it. So I decided to look at life the way it is. I modified my own behavioural methods, and I started implementing them on my staff and team.”

One seminar led to another
“One day someone invited me to speak. It was a Rotary club type of an event and I got an amazing response. Because I had gone through it myself, I knew how it worked. So many years, 47 countries now, half a million people. No matter which country you go to, everybody is the same. I can take a middle class person, an upper class person and a poor person and they’ll have identical problems. No difference. Lucky for me, my job is quite easy. In a nutshell I got into this not because I wanted to do it but because it had such a profound impact on me. I realised there are so many people out there who are unhappy. There’s so much pressure on people to earn money, have a car, etc. People are having a tough time now. In India especially, relationships are a mess, people are in financial debt, they don’t know what to do. I can’t tell people to be positive.”

‘Indians are people pleasers’
“The problem with India is that people are brought up with the mind set of — not to make mistakes. ‘You make a mistake, you’re punished’. If you’re punished, next time you won’t take a risk, you’ll play safe. You’ll find here, children when they grow up, when they are 24-25, they’re still looking for parental guidance, which I find nice yet strange. They can’t make a decision, they’ve been told all their lives not to make mistakes. Abroad one good thing is that you’re encouraged to make mistakes. If you make a mistake there, it’s not frowned upon. Having said that, things are changing here now. We’re also told to please people. Everyone is a pleaser here. Men have massive complex because women are becoming stronger and men are turning into pleasers. There’s a conflict. So if there’s one thing I could change in India would be the nice guy mentality — ‘pass your exams, don’t make mistakes, keep quiet’.”

He adds, “On the other hand, you’ve got so much culture here, long hours of hard work, bonding, entrepreneurship and high energy people. If I were to pick between living in the West or living in India, I’d pick India any day. The challenge here is everybody wants to ape the West. Nothing wrong with that. When people are trained to be someone they are not, there’s a massive conflict. When I came here first, most of the problems were financial — ‘how do I make money, how do I gain stability?’ Today 80 per cent of the problems are in relationships. There are relationship challenges galore. Divorce rates are going up. It’s not because women are becoming independent but because people can’t keep up with the really fast-changing world.”

Hrithik and I
“I’m not Hrithik’s life coach and I want to make it very clear. We’re friends. We share ideas. There’s no hiring a life coach to make life better.” When I ask him why Hrithik sounds preachy and philosophical in most of his interviews, he’s quick to defend the superstar. “In my opinion, the way he speaks may come across as philosophical but what you hear is genuinely the man. I don’t think he’s stubborn. I didn’t have to guide him. It was the other way around. He guided me on how to lose weight. I followed his advice to the T for eight weeks and I lost 12 kilos. I pushed myself over the limit. We hang out. We have coffee. We talk. We share information. I ask him, how to increase my metabolic rate, he’ll ask me how to gain focus. How to do things he wants to do. He’s an exceptional guy and whatever he touches will work. He wants to become better. Being a superstar, he can impact the world in a profound way. He’s got loads of challenges in his life and he’s overcome them. He’s good at what he does. I didn’t help him.”

He recalls his first meeting with the superstar. “I have known him for four years. We met through his trainer Satya who’s been a friend of mine for 14 years. The conversation started with ‘What do you do? What’s that? Never heard of that before’. We started hanging out and became friends. Then for losing weight, I thought, who’s the best guy I could think of and I thought of Mr Roshan. He’s very open with information and he’s not shy to share it with anyone. He gave me the guidance.”

Brush with films
“I was in a movie called Mere Brother Ki Dulhan. I’m not an actor but someone tricked me into going for an audition. I play an autistic guy and I look big in the film. Then I lost weight.”

Personal life
“I have a wife who’s amazing. We don’t have children. We had a miscarriage. I love children. I’d love to have four or five by now. I’m from London. I keep coming to India on and off. My parents are from Kolkata but they’ve been in London for 60 years now. My father has been into businesses like domestic water filters and a driving school. My brother and sister are also based in London. I met my wife in Mumbai. My wife now is an actor on TV — Sara Khan. She acts in a lot of TV shows. It’s been her passion. It’s very strange I met her through a friend of mine. I saw her. I met her two to three times. I said to my friend, I’m going to marry her one day. I don’t believe in love at first sight but I just knew.”

Books
“I have written three books. Become Rich Now With Network Marketing, The Secret Millionaire Blueprint and You Can You Will It’s Your Choice. The fourth one is being published by Penguin Books. It’s really bizarre because I failed in English three times. I never passed. Now I’m writing books. I say that not because I’m proud of that. I transcribed all my chapters in my first book and it was published by McMillan. Next one, I self-published it because the publishers weren’t pushing it the way I wanted it to be pushed. I must have sold 90,000 copies without going in the book store. Now my book is actually going to be launched by Hirthik with a foreword by him in August, in Delhi. The one published by Penguin is to be delivered in October. It’s called, Where will you be in five years time.”

My seminars — live reality TV
“I work with corporates and ask them why would you hire someone only on the basis of their degree. How about the way they communicate, they move forward. In my line of work, my seminars have gone from 50 people to a few thousands. If you come to my seminar, you’ll be shocked. Some woman will stand up and say, ‘my husband is a b******’. People in India don’t do that usually because one is not comfortable having a conversation. It’s like a live reality show. It’s amazing how India is changing. This wouldn’t happen 10 years ago.”

Life coach coming out of corner
“Ultimately results will decide. I believe in ETR: Earn the right — for me to come and coach you, I need to earn that right. How do I earn that right? I should have sufficient evidence to prove that I’m capable enough to do what I do. Now unfortunately this industry, people read a motivational book, they mug it up and they become a life coach. It’s dangerous. Most people who come to me are not the people who are depressed, they are the kind of people who want to make a difference to their lives. A lot of life coaches deal with people who are depressed. Next five years it’s going to be a jungle, it happened in the US early on and over a period of time, there will be one or two or three, who’ll be set apart from everyone else.”

Meena Iyer (BOMBAY TIMES; June 28, 2015)

Shaheen Parkar (MID-DAY; July 2, 2014)

In the courtroom drama, Adalat, protagonist Ronit Roy is known to take up cases for the common man. So it was a case of role reversal for the actor when recently, telly actress Sara Khan took him on for his apparently highhanded behaviour on the sets of the show.

Says a source, “On this day of the shoot, Ronit, who plays defence lawyer K D Pathak, kept muttering something about his co-actors. He seemed to have been irritated by something. When he passed comments about Sara, who plays public prosecutor Naina, she decided to give him a fitting reply.” Needless to say, the cast and crew was taken aback by Sara’s reaction. “They did not expect her to respond, leave alone retaliate,” says the source.

Sara confirms the story. “I am a no-nonsense person. On the day of the shoot, Ronit kept saying that he was acting with a bunch of madcaps. During a particular scene, I had to look down to pause and reflect and he questioned my method of acting. He made life difficult for all the co-actors, but they preferred to turn a blind eye. His body language and attitude was demeaning to others,” she recounts, adding that she felt compelled to react.

“I knew someone had to give it back to him; the director and the production house would not tell him anything because of his big celebrity pull,” says Sara, who is best remembered for playing the character of Alka in Dhoondh Legi Manzil Humein (2010-11). Ronit, however, says, “I say many things that I do not remember. I can’t even recollect this actress.”

Seema Sinha (BOMBAY TIMES; January 3, 2014)

It seems to be an endless battle between actress Sara Khan and the producer of the film, Midsummer Midnight Mumbai, Mohammed Ali Guddu. Ali and director Braj Bhushan had alleged that Sara and her boyfriend Paras Chhabra, who is the hero of the film, gave them trouble during the shoot, with the schedule going haywire.

Sara hit back saying, “One fine day, the producer decided to act and he became the villain in the film. I was asked to romance him and even do steamy scenes with him. How can I romance an old man? I wasn’t aware that the film was also supposed to be his launchpad. He kept extending his role and started promoting himself.”

However, Ali refutes the allegations. He says, “I play an ACP, an anti-hero in the film. Sara and I don’t even share screen space, so there is no question of steamy scenes between us.”

He adds, “They wanted advance payment for another film, starring them and financed by me. Since I am not much interested in that project, they are delaying this film.”

However, Sara insists that Ali wanted to romance her. “We share screen space in a song sequence, and I have a video as evidence. He is lying,” she says.

With controversies refusing to die, we wonder what the fate of this film would be.

Ankur Pathak (MUMBAI MIRROR; December 31, 2013)

Sara Khan, who shot to fame with the TV show Bidaai and stayed in the limelight with a run in various reality shows, is giving the producers of her latest film, Midsummer Midnight Mumbai, sleepless nights. A source told Mirror, “Sara has become so difficult that the producers regret signing her."

Says the source, "Sara routinely threw tantrums on set and one time, even refused to shoot for a scene in a busy street owing to lack of a vanity van."

When contacted, director Braj Bhushan confirmed the news. “How can I park a vanity van at a busy traffic junction? A few people laughed at us when we went to the BMC asking for permission.”

He alleged that Sara and boyfriend Paras Chhabra, would always come late on the set, delaying the shot.
 “We had to almost cancel a song sequence because the two didn’t turn up at all. While we were at Ratnagiri, they would report at 2 for a 6 am schedule. The budget went haywire.”

Braj has somehow managed to complete the film, which is gearing up for a March release, and has vowed to never work with Sara again. “It was a big mistake to sign her,” he said. Despite repeated attempts, Sara Khan could not be reached for a comment.