"I don't listen to ragas anymore, now I listen to Lady Gaga," Khan told the 300-strong audience at the event. "My son and daughter have converted me from Saturday night fever to Justin Bieber." Ahead of the release of Ra. One, his newest film and which he claims to be India's biggest movie, Khan said he had been speaking to Gaga's manager about possibly working together.
"I've been chatting up with her about a song I want to do with her, and her manager said 'Lady Gaga wants to introduce you to her audience and she wants to be introduced to your audience'," Khan said. "So one can say she believes in pure, simple and wonderful business," the superstar added.
Using his characteristic humour to keep the audience entertained - the actor even threatened to use a Gaga technique and begin undressing if his speech got too boring - Khan even boiled his ethos down to the focal point of the book he was launching - the art of selling.
"I believe everything should be sold. Even life doesn't come for free," the 46-year-old actor said. " I'm a proud seller of dreams, that's why you can buy me, you can pay for me to come to a wedding, you can tell me to stand over here on my head, to entertain people... I will even sell my body if it makes someone smile." Shah Rukh was speaking at the launch of the book Thorns to Competition by IIPM's Arindam and Rajita Chaudhuri.
Honorary director of the IIPM thinktank and also a film producer, Arindam, said the book was the result of four years of his wife's research into the most 'exciting' part of business: marketing.
"A satisfied consumer is a marketing man's worst nightmare because then I lie awake at night wondering how I'll sell you my next product," dressed in a characteristically flamboyant white suit, Chaudhari told the crowd.
"It's all about going to the market and smashing the competition," the businessman added.
Pointing to models as varied as Shahrukh and tobacco companies, Chaudhari said: "The key to marketing was marking out your own space in the competition.
"If a company is successful, it is because it has bought space in your mind. That's what all the best are trying to do now," Chaudhuri said.
Chaudhuri's wife Rajita, who co-authored the book and is also a faculty member at IIPM, pointed out that even Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi had to draw inspiration from marketing techniques to sell his ideas to India.
"He too had to reinvent himself, he used to dress like an English lawyer, but he changed, dropped that... he understood that he would never be able to sell armed fights in the streets to Indians," she said. "It's the power of being aggressive. You have to stand out, look out, shout out - or be shut out.