By 1.55 pm on a day that began at an unholy eight in the morning, MSK has been fortified by a formidable succession of strong, sugarless coffees, kadak chais and enough Red Bull to lend the industrial kitchen a distinctly potent atmosphere. MGMT’s “Electric Feel” hums somewhere in the background; crockery clatters; someone is discussing lunch. Rahul Khanna, meanwhile, is carefully contemplating the architecture of a watermelon before slicing into it for the camera.
It is an oddly perfect tableau for an actor, VJ, model and writer who has spent decades moving between Bollywood, fashion and popular culture—and who appears to have retained an almost pathological interest in the business of noticing things.
Disarmingly warm and conversational, Khanna has already made everyone on set feel like friends he has known for years. There is remarkably little evidence of fatigue, despite the early call time and the long day ahead (the cameras don’t call it a day until a fairly heroic 7.45 pm). Between shots, he is chatty and playful—the kitchen and its edible paraphernalia requiring none of the self-conscious choreography that such things ordinarily demand. He simply observes, engages, asks questions.
In Khanna’s world, it seems, nothing is quite incidental.
There is something gloriously anachronistic about his devotion to polish and civility, and a healthy preoccupation with the small graces that have, somewhere along the way, become unfashionable in 2026. Yet, this is no sepia-toned relic of masculine propriety. He believes in dressing properly. In manners. In rules, even. And beneath this lurks a mischievous, highly entertained man with a nose for absurdity, a scalpel-sharp wit and an evident delight in puncturing pomposity wherever he encounters it.
For Khanna, attention to detail is a condition, almost a low-grade affliction. He describes himself as “very, very observant and hypersensitive to my surroundings… You could leave me alone in a room and I would be able to entertain myself for hours just observing details.” It is a faculty he genuinely relishes, though he is candid about its cost. Such hypervigilance, he concedes, can be “debilitating.”
“I think lately, I’ve started consciously trying to be less aware and sensitive, just because it takes up so much energy,” he admits. A startlingly frank confession from a man whose every gesture suggests an eye that has never, in its life, learnt how to switch off.
That eye extends, inevitably, to food. For Khanna, eating is never a matter of taste in isolation because “the whole experience is sensory.” There is a hierarchy: the eyes first, then the nose, then touch, and only eventually, the mouth. “I don’t like things to be unnecessarily fancy,” he clarifies, “but I like a bit of effort to go into everything.”
Even alone, assembling nothing grander than toast and eggs, he curates with ceremony, as can be seen on his Instagram grid. It is, in fact, the inspiration for staging this photoshoot in an industrial kitchen today, with Khanna fronting the hob. Of the breakfasts he posts on his feed, he says, “I will try and make sure it’s plated nicely. I like the presentation of it. A beautifully arranged meal can genuinely transform how it tastes; a carelessly presented one, conversely, becomes “very unappealing, even if it’s the most delicious food.”
Khanna has scant patience for what he calls “philistinism”—the studied cultural indifference, the reflexive modern habit of dismissing enthusiasm as embarrassing. “I hate that,” he says, with real feeling. You needn’t be fashionable, nor even particularly stylish, but you should care enough to try. He recalls once spotting a rickshaw driver in “a perfectly ironed shirt,” trousers sharply creased, and finding something quite moving in it. It comes back, always, to the same two words: “Details. Effort.”
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that “beauty” surfaces so often in conversation with him as we sit in his vanity van in between outfit changes and light set ups—not as a throwaway aesthetic compliment, but as something closer to a governing philosophy. Asked whether he considers himself an aesthete, he initially grimaces at the word for sounding “a bit pretentious,” before offering a definition of beauty considerably more capacious. “I honestly think there’s nothing more important than beauty,” he says. “And when I say beauty, that also encompasses things like kindness and integrity.” The people he gravitates toward, he explains, tend to be people who trade in beauty—architects, photographers, painters, assorted creatives. It is a temperament: an appetite for form, ideas, atmosphere and for the sense that life has been truly considered.
Fashion, naturally, falls under the same jurisdiction. His wardrobe shows a marked disinterest in the frantic churn of seasonal novelty. “My natural go-to is very simple. I don’t like colours, so my wardrobe is mainly black, white, navy, grey. Classic. When I find something, I tend to buy multiples of it, and one excellent travel suit becomes two or three.” He has no interest in reinventing himself with each passing season; his clothes are not meant to announce transformation, only to feel unmistakably like him.
There is a discipline running through all of this. “I do enjoy a bit of restriction,” Khanna admits. He likes formality and the scaffolding it provides. “I am a rule follower to a certain extent.” But he is fascinated by the precise moment convention becomes something worth dismantling on purpose. “At some point, you have to practice the rules to be able to then break them,” he explains. “The great artists, designers, architects—even chefs—who subvert convention do so precisely because they know the rules so well and are able to really break them in a very intentional way.”
It is a thought that says more about him than he perhaps intends. Khanna’s relationship with discipline is about fluency; he doesn’t experience rules as rigid constraints or some joyless obstacle course he has to limp through, but as something he can move within instinctively. It is a useful way, too, to understand how he has navigated a life spent between worlds: growing up the son of superstar Vinod Khanna and a mother who stayed out the limelight; moving through fashion, television, Bollywood and Hollywood; and living between cultures, from his Punjabi-Parsi roots to the influences he has absorbed through his travels. He has never seemed particularly interested in pandering to the system, but he knows how to operate within it, choosing what to embrace and what to leave behind.
His rituals reflect the same exactitude, delivered with characteristic lack of ceremony. Every morning, wherever he happens to wake—home, hotel, even after a red-eye—he makes his bed. “I
can’t start my day unless my bed is made by me.” It need not be restored to pristine order; he simply “straightens things out.” The kitchen receives identical treatment. “I can’t go to bed with a dirty kitchen. Staff or no staff, it must be completely reset at the end of the day.”
The word, tellingly, is borrowed from film sets. After a take, the director calls cut; before the next, everything returns to its original mark. “They say reset,” Khanna explains. “So everything goes back to the first position.” He has, in a small act of quiet poetry, smuggled the term into everyday life. “The appeal isn’t tidiness alone but the promise of a clean slate. So that when you wake up the next day, you’re starting afresh with everything.” He cannot think clearly in disorder, he admits, well aware that others thrive in chaos. But he simply isn’t built that way.
***
“I think being a little restrained is respectful,” Khanna says, skeptical of that fashionable insistence that one ought to be perpetually relaxed, unbuttoned, slouched into one’s surroundings as though good posture were itself a form of oppression. He wants his guests at ease, certainly, but within limits. “I can’t bear it when people put their feet up on a sofa.” Excessive relaxation, to his eye, curdles quickly into “a little sloppy.” He has always been, he admits, “a little... formal.” And age has only deepened the conviction.
That same hard-won self-knowledge governs his relationship with his body as well. Fitness has always interested him, but it took years to isolate what actually suited him, whom he trusted, what he could sustain long-term. “Once I found what worked for me and what I enjoyed doing and what was sustainable, I became really quite militant about it.” There’s no arbitrary quota of workouts to hit. He trains “as much as I can—bound by time and recovery”—and takes a rest day without guilt when his body demands one.
Discipline extends to what he eats: which is “a variation of the paleo diet”—whole foods, relatively high in protein and, as he puts it, minimal fuss. He avoids sugar, but will eat most things, with a few firm exceptions—pork, notably—but the governing principle remains the same. None of this, however, makes him any less of a foodie. There is room for pleasure, and the occasional lapse—an exceptional chocolate cake at a friend’s dinner party, say. But for the most part, his palate has been recalibrated around what sugar does, and doesn’t, offer him. “The pleasure sugar brings is fleeting: It makes me feel good for a few seconds while I’m eating.” Even chocolate comes with restraint. “I used to be a milk chocolate person. But now, I cannot even conceive of eating milk chocolate. I just find it too sweet,” he admits.
An instinct for discernment extends well beyond the plate. He describes his home as meticulously ordered, sparing in colour, unforgiving of clutter. He notices everything, though what registers first is rarely a single object. It’s the feeling of the room itself. “Every room makes you feel a certain way,” he says. Only afterward comes the granular audit: how things are arranged, what has earned its place, and what has not. “If there’s not a place for something, it gets tossed.”
Visitors, he says, often try to diagnose him through his décor, arriving at the same conclusion: “Oh, do you have OCD?” His own explanation is less clinical: “It’s just that everything is very thought through.”
His personal style has evolved along an identical arc. Take what serves you. Discard the rest. Working across fashion and entertainment gives him license to experiment—silhouettes, shoes, whatever—before retaining only what genuinely feels right. “You may not wear the whole look, but you might like a general vibe incorporated into it.” No obligation to swallow an entire aesthetic whole. Travel has also added to the broadening of that vocabulary considerably. Every locale deposits something. So does every crew: a local stylist here, a different hair-and-make-up artist there, another photographer with another eye for what looks right. “There are certain things that you can pick up along the way,” he says, “and I guess you can only pick up when you are exposed to it.” The caveat matters. Exposure is only useful to the receptive. “I dislike when people are closed to new ideas. I think it’s nice to be a little open, right?” he smiles.
That deliberateness about what belongs in his life extends to something less tangible: what he chooses to exclude. Privacy and silence rank, he says, among “one of the most important things for me—and with age, they’ve only appreciated in value.” This hardly means retreating from public view: Khanna is, after all, remarkably generous with the self he chooses to put on display, particularly on social media. The distinction, for him, is between being visible and being entirely available. “I think you can still share, but I don’t think you have to share everything.” There is value, he believes, in preserving something “that’s just for yourself.”
What the world sees is “the tip of the iceberg, but there’s more,” he insists. “It’s still got the same DNA, if that makes sense. It’s still ice.” No hidden second self, merely more of the same substance, simply not yet surfaced.
If anything, what has diminished with age is his interest in making an impression. Asked what he’s grown less interested in impressing people with, his answer is gloriously blunt: “Everything.” There are exceptions, though. “I’m happy if people are impressed by things like punctuality or manners or etiquette. Which is a scarcity, I think.” Time, for Khanna, has acquired an almost moral weight. Punctuality is courtesy. Manners function on the same logic. And effort, it turns out, is something Khanna understands rather more intimately than his famously effortless image might suggest.
How much labour underwrites the illusion that none has occurred? “As you grow older and know yourself more, you become a little more at ease with how you present yourself. The formula, stripped bare, is simple: know your likes, your dislikes, stop performing omnidirectional appeal,” he notes. What reads as effortless from the outside may, in truth, be the accumulated result of years spent editing.
***
We move to different topics and arrive at one of his more delightfully unexpected quirks. “I like impressing people with the NATO alphabet,” says Khanna, who has lived in India, schooled and worked in New York, spent time in Singapore, and travelled extensively across America, Europe and the Far East. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta and onward: knowledge acquired for the mundane purpose of relaying PNRs to airlines but happily deployed for recreational effect the moment he “senses someone being impressed.” Sign language is next on the list.
Evidently, there remains room in his life for a few well-chosen party tricks.
One of his favourite sensory rituals unfolds in the strange, suspended hush right after an international flight lifts off—seatbelt sign still glowing, cabin frozen in that peculiar post-ascent stillness where everyone is, for once, content to simply be. Then, from the galley: “The pop of the first champagne bottle. Nothing more. Just that very subtle pop. To me, that’s so exciting because everything else is quiet.” An almost absurdly modest pleasure, which is precisely its charm. He’s equally susceptible to nature—remote hotels swaddled in it, “an amazing beach,” the sea (“I love the sea”)—and dogs, though he doesn’t own one, given that he’s “all over the place” with a demanding work schedule. His workaround, however, is characteristically pragmatic: “I borrow dogs.” Friends and family, presumably, keep the supply chain running.
Off the clock, he reads—almost exclusively fiction, and preferably fiction that transports him as far as possible from his own life. “I don't like anything too familiar.” Japanese detective fiction, murder mysteries, historical thrillers: worlds governed by entirely different rules and geographies. A recent favourite is Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a murder mystery set in rural Poland, which he ranks among “one of the best books I’ve ever read, you must read it too,” while simultaneously dismissing its title as “the worst in the world”—an appropriately Khanna-esque contradiction, ruthless discernment sitting comfortably beside genuine delight in something imperfect. He found it, as he finds most of the best things, through trusted friends.
What still manages to surprise him at this stage of life? “Good customer service,” he says wryly, precisely because it's “getting harder and harder to find.” He’s also disproportionately moved by excellent service when he encounters it. “When someone gets it exactly right, a five-star rating won’t suffice—I’m a big letter writer.” He composes “the most incredible review and letter,” routes it to the relevant supervisors, and ensures the credit lands where it’s earned. The inverse impulse remains equally intact: “I also write lots of complaints,” he says with a laugh.
Khanna is attentive to how things are done, and notices when people are doing them well. What appears, at first glance, to be mere polish is really his philosophy made visible. He cares about details without fetishising them; about rules without being imprisoned by them; about beauty without flattening it into only what the eye can see; about privacy without mistaking it for secrecy. There is something almost radical about that now. In a culture increasingly devoted to speed, irony and the performance of not caring, Khanna has chosen the opposite path: to care selectively and without apology. To dress properly. To arrive on time. To make the bed. To reset the kitchen. To notice the way a shirt has been ironed, the way a plate has been arranged, the way a room makes you feel. To know the rules well enough to break them beautifully. Even his restraint has a certain generosity to it—a refusal to consume everything simply because it is there, whether that means attention, admiration or the public’s endless appetite for access—and, then every so often, when to simply let the champagne bottle pop somewhere in the background.