Babil Khan has found a new way to fill the gaps in a punishing shoot schedule. He's currently filming an upcoming project in Pahalgam, and between setups he's been out on the golf course, a hobby that appears to have crept up on him rather than arrived by design.

It started small. Now it's become something he actively looks forward to when the cameras stop rolling for the day.

What's interesting is how Babil frames it. He doesn't talk about golf as a way to switch off from work. He talks about it as an extension of the work.

"When life came to a point where immense pressure was needed to refine me to the next stage of my evolution, I started looking for tools to help that progress. I found golf in that search," he said.

There's an obvious weight behind that sentence, and Babil doesn't shy from naming it. He is, after all, carrying a surname that comes loaded with expectation, being the son of Irrfan Khan, an actor whose body of work still shapes how Indian cinema is talked about internationally.

"The disposition needed to play golf is also, at a grander stage, needed to handle the pressure of taking upon a legacy so big and being an actor in the lineage I come from," he added.

Ask him to distill the sport down and he'll give you three words: practice, focus, surrender. He says those are the essentials of golf, and in the same breath, the essentials of figuring himself out. "The three essentials needed to play golf are practice, focus and surrender, which help me understand and navigate my own refinement," he said.

It's a lot of introspection for a guy swinging a nine-iron between takes, but that's kind of the point he's making. For Babil, patience and staying present aren't just golf skills. They're acting skills too, and he seems to be using one to sharpen the other.

The Pahalgam shoot itself hasn't been detailed much beyond the location, so what the project actually is remains under wraps for now. Babil has also been reported to be lining up a Malayalam debut, in Babu Janardhanan's Gandhi Bazar Sunday Market, which suggests he's spreading his bets across industries rather than sticking to one lane.

For the moment though, the story out of Pahalgam is a quieter one. An actor finding his footing, one round of golf at a time, while the bigger reveal, whatever the film turns out to be, waits for its own moment.