The flashbulbs don’t care about nuance. They don’t care about the 90-degree humidity of Mumbai or the fact that wearing a wide-brimmed felt hat in a tropical climate is, objectively speaking, a cry for help. All they care about is the "vibe."
Arhaan Khan stepped out recently sporting a cowboy hat, and the paparazzi—that roving band of clout-chasers with smartphone stabilizers—immediately knew the script. They didn't see a young man trying to find a personal style. They saw a biological firmware update. "Salman Bhai ka look!" they screamed, their voices cracking over the sound of shutter clicks.
It was a glitch in the celebrity simulation.
We’ve reached a point where the Bollywood "nepo baby" isn’t even a person anymore. They’re a legacy asset. Arhaan, the son of Arbaaz Khan and Malaika Arora, is currently being beta-tested for public consumption. Every public appearance is a data point. The cowboy hat? That was a stress test for the algorithm. It’s a specific kind of visual shorthand. In the Venn diagram of Indian pop culture, "man in a cowboy hat" has been colonised by Salman Khan’s Bharat or Dabangg energy. By donning the headwear, Arhaan wasn't just blocking the sun; he was opt-ing into a pre-existing brand identity.
It’s efficient, if you think about it. Why spend a decade building a unique public persona when you can just raid your uncle’s costume department and trigger a million Instagram impressions in sixty seconds?
The friction here is obvious. It’s the trade-off between individuality and the path of least resistance. Arhaan is twenty-something, an age where most people are making embarrassing fashion choices in relative anonymity. But for a Khan, the price of entry into the public consciousness is a total surrender of the self. The paparazzi aren't looking for Arhaan. They’re looking for the ghost of 1990s Salman. They want the swagger, the chest-out gait, and the specific brand of hyper-masculinity that sells movie tickets in Tier-2 cities.
When the paps yell "Bhai ka look," they’re performing a service. They’re tagging the metadata. They’re ensuring the video performs well on the Reels "Explore" page by linking it to a high-value keyword. "Salman Khan" is a blue-chip stock; "Arhaan Khan" is a speculative NFT. By linking the two, the paparazzi are basically performing a pump-and-dump scheme on our collective attention spans.
Let's talk about the hat itself. It’s a piece of Americana dropped into the middle of Bandra. It’s ridiculous. It screams "I’ve spent time in LA and now I think I’m a protagonist." But in the context of the Mumbai celebrity industrial complex, it’s just a prop. It’s no different from a Vision Pro headset—expensive, slightly isolating, and mostly used to signal that you’re living in a different reality than the people watching you.
The comments sections are already a graveyard of "Same to same" and "Next Superstar" emojis. It’s the sound of a feedback loop closing. We’ve stopped asking if these kids have talent, or even if they have a personality. We just want to know if the facial recognition software in our brains can find the family resemblance.
Arhaan played along. He gave them the smirk. He walked with that familiar, slightly stiff-shouldered confidence that suggests he’s been watching the tapes. It’s a performance of a performance. We are watching a young man become a caricature before he’s even become an adult.
The cost of this "Bhai" branding isn't cheap. It costs you the ability to ever be seen as an original. You become a derivative work. A sequel that nobody asked for but everyone will watch because the intellectual property is too valuable to let sit on a shelf.
The paparazzi got their clip. The fan pages got their "Who wore it better?" side-by-sides. The algorithm fed the beast, and for twenty-four hours, the internet pretended that a felt hat was a cultural milestone.
But as the flashes fade and the car door shuts, you have to wonder if Arhaan looks in the mirror and sees a cowboy, or if he just sees a very expensive shadow.
How many more versions of the same man do we actually need?