Karan Johar

Johar was born on 25 May 1972 in Bombay, India to a Punjabi father, film producer Yash Johar, founder of Dharma Productions and a Sindhi mother, Hiroo Johar. He studied at the Green Lawns High School. In his autobiography, An Unsuitable Boy, Johar recounts that he took the entrance test of the elite all-boys boarding school, The Doon School in Dehradun, but scored a zero in mathematics. This led the then headmaster Gulab Ramchandani to write a very "emotional letter" to Johar's mother, declining admission. After Green Lawns, he attended H.R. College of Commerce and Economics, both in Mumbai. Johar started his career in the entertainment industry as an actor, when he played the role of Shrikant in the 1989 Doordarshan serial Indradhanush. As a child, he was influenced by commercial Indian cinema: He cites Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra and Sooraj Barjatya as his inspirations. For a time, Johar followed numerology, creating film titles in which the first word and a number of others in the title began with the letter K. After watching the 2006 comedy-drama Lage Raho Munna Bhai which was critical of numerology, Johar decided to stop this practice. Discussing his sexual orientation, Johar said "Everybody knows what my sexual orientation is. I don't need to scream it out. If I need to spell it out, I won't only because I live in a country where I could possibly be jailed for saying this". In February 2017, Johar became father to twins (a boy and a girl) through surrogacy. The twins were born at Masrani Hospital in Mumbai. Johar named his son Yash after his father, and his daughter Roohi named by rearranging his mother's name Hiroo. In 2020, the death of Sushant Singh Rajput sparked a debate on nepotism in the Hindi film industry. Johar was one of the personalities who was targeted by the late actor's fans for allegedly encouraging nepotism by casting children of established Bollywood stars in his films instead of outsider talents. Johar was first accused of this by Kangana Ranaut on Koffee With Karan. Various members of the industry came to his defence. A complaint was filed against Johar and other Bollywood actors "for abetting" Rajput's suicide. Discussing nepotism, Johar said that his production house has introduced 21 debut directors, "out of which, I can say, 16–17 are not 'nepotistic' young filmmakers. They are not from the fraternity or the industry. They are completely from outside." Regarding his casting insiders, Johar said, "Why do they discredit some of the actors who are from (the industry)? I think they are talented enough to face the camera".