Salman Khan and Aishwarya Rai: The Media's Favorite Unfinished Story

The media's persistent interest in whatever residual feeling Salman Khan might harbor for his former girlfriend Aishwarya Rai—years after both had moved on to different relationships and different chapters of their professional lives—says something about the peculiar longevity of Bollywood romantic mythology and the entertainment industry's appetite for a love story that never fully resolved.

Khan and Rai's relationship in the late 1990s was one of Hindi cinema's most scrutinized pairings—two of the industry's biggest stars together, followed by a separation that by various accounts involved behavior from Khan that Rai later characterized in public terms as abusive. The relationship ended badly, and the public accounting of its ending placed both parties in positions they would have preferred to avoid.

The subsequent trajectory of both careers made the comparison uncomfortable for one side. Rai went on to marry actor Abhishek Bachchan in 2007, joining one of Bollywood's most prominent families, winning international recognition at Cannes, and maintaining a visibility that spanned two decades. Khan's love life remained a subject of tabloid speculation; his professional success was enormous but his personal life more turbulent.

The "fretting" narrative—that Khan was still emotionally affected by Rai years later—was fed by occasional public comments that could be interpreted as unresolved feeling and by the entertainment media's investment in a story structure that preferred an inconclusive romance to a tidy ending.

Both parties would presumably prefer to be remembered for their films. The media had different preferences.