Imran: An Intense, Intimate Encounter

In the August 1984 issue of ‘SAVVY’, actress-activist Shabana Azmi, then Special Correspondent of ‘SAVVY’, interviewed the hot blooded Imran Khan for the magazine. Today, 34 years later, Imran, with gorgeous looks and guts intact, has been sworn in as the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Read on and let the killer Khan charm bowl you out all over again…

I know very little about cricket. In that sense, I am not a great Imran Khan fan. And it wasn’t to learn about cricket that I planned to meet him for my first ‘encounter’ for ‘SAVVY’ because that, if anything, would merely reveal my own ignorance about the game.

I was more interested in him because he is such a great, big sex-symbol. I wanted to find out the kind of person he is and whether this sex-symbol thing affects him. For some reason, maybe because he has got so much female adulation, I presumed he would be a male chauvinist. And I read somewhere that he had made some very disparaging remarks about Indian film actresses, that he had run down actresses, called them uncomplimentary names in an interview given to a Pakistani journal. So I thought I’d meet him, confront him, expose him.

Not that we hadn’t met before. Once, I was with Shekhar at that time, Imran and I were introduced, there were other people around. I do not remember much more than that, the meeting did not leave any particular impression in my mind. It seldom does when there are other people around.

This time it was just the two of us, interviewer and interviewee. I was in London and he, of course, was there.

We fixed up a meeting and he came over to where I was staying, hobbling on his plastered foot. The leg which has kept him out of cricket for so long, is still in plaster, but it is amazing how much mileage he can get out of it. He can do almost everything with it, including drive a car… and most things, except play cricket.

I was very concerned about the plaster. I wanted to give him a cushion to rest his foot on. He said, “Relax, I’ve lived with this.”