Salman Khan Said “PR” Like a Cuss Word; and He Wasn’t Entirely Wrong.

Salman Khan opened the final season of Koffee with Karan, and the internet clipped everything: marriage, kids, Karisma.

I was stuck on one sentence.

“Since PR has come in, some people pay the PR for their sighting or whatever it is called.”

He was talking about the paparazzi: actresses photographed from angles they never agreed to, and the difference between stars who invite cameras and those who don’t. On the facts, he wasn’t wrong. The airport look exists. The tipped-off photographers exist. So does the “candid” gym exit that took three calls to arrange. What stayed with me was the word doing the work in that sentence. ‘PR’, said the way you’d say a mild cuss word. Everyone knew what it meant, and none of it was flattering.

PR is one part of my work, and a part I take seriously.

What the word leaves out

I’ve spent over two decades in corporate communications, through two public-market listings. Most days, PR has looked nothing like an airport arrival. It has looked like a finance team at midnight, checking that a number in a press release matches the filing to the decimal. In a listed company, a rounding error is not a typo. It is a disclosure problem. It has looked like rewriting a single sentence six times, because an investor, a journalist and an employee will each read it differently, and all three deserve the truth. It has looked like the 7 a.m. call after a story breaks, when the job is to get the facts on record before speculation hardens into belief.

None of that involves a photographer at T2. Almost none of it is ever seen. That is not an accident. It is the design.

A different brief, not a lesser one

Here’s what’s easy to miss: Salman’s own sentence says some people pay. The star asks for the sighting. The PR person who delivers it is doing exactly what they were hired to do and doing it well. Keeping someone visible in a market this crowded takes instinct, relationships and hours nobody sees. So the problem isn’t that this corner of PR exists. It’s that one brief has come to stand for the whole profession.

How the word lost its meaning

The best PR is invisible. Done well, the public sees a calm statement, a credible spokesperson, a clear number. It does not see us. Done badly, the seams show, and the seams are what people remember. We are judged by our failures because our successes are built to disappear.
It’s also on us. We tell everyone else’s story and rarely tell our own. We let “PR” mean everything from crisis advice to airport sightings, then wonder why it no longer means much at all.
Attention became the currency. Somewhere in the scroll, visibility got mistaken for reputation. Visibility is being seen. Reputation is what people believe about you when you’re not in the room. Visibility can be arranged. Reputation has to be earned, slowly, and can be lost in an afternoon.

Why this matters beyond our industry

If “PR” means “fake,” people stop believing what companies say, even when it’s true. A safety alert, a correction, an apology after something goes wrong: all of it gets dismissed as spin. That hurts the public, who end up ignoring information they need. And it hurts honest companies, because no one believes them. PR exists to build trust. When the word itself loses trust, everyone pays for it.

The point hiding in the comment

The irony is that Salman’s real argument was about consent. Some people want the camera and some don’t, and the difference deserves respect. That’s a reputation principle, and a deeply PR one. Knowing when not to speak, when not to be seen, when to protect someone’s space, is half this job. It never makes the highlights reel. So, I’m not offended. It’s a useful mirror. If PR is becoming a cuss word, the answer isn’t a campaign to polish our own image. That would only prove the point. The answer is the work: