End of year lists are all the rage at the moment and with only a few days left in 2008, everyone and their mothers are posting top lists for everything (my favourite so far: 2008 Top 10 Most Strangest Creatures and Cryptozoology) and Newsweek has entered the fray with their list of the 50 most powerful people in the world.

Not surprisingly, Newsweek’s list is full of prominent Political (Barack Obama at #1), Financial (Warren Buffett at #19) and Religious (Pope Benedict XVI at #37) figures but there are also a few surprises on the list. Oprah Winfrey makes the list not for her entertainment empire but her affiliation with the new President Elect, John Lasseter gets on the list thanks to his success with Pixar while Steve Jobs, though more of a enigma than an entertainer, makes the list for his sheer power over combined geekdoms but of all the names on the list, it was #41 that impressed me. The sole entertainer (or perhaps I should say the only one generally recognized as an entertainer) on the list isn’t a pop music star or a Hollywood giant and perhaps his appearance on the list is a testament to the oncoming invasion, but we have to look East, far East for this one: Shahrukh Khan.

The “king of Bollywood” is mostly known to us Bollywood uneducated as a singing and dancing superstar but Khan’s films push the envelope on what’s considered acceptable in Indian culture and his films, as cheesy as they appear on the surface, carry a message of tolerance and acceptance. Whoever said that singing and dancing couldn’t save the world never saw Khan in action.

Thanks to regular reader Ramchandra Solanki for the tip. The entire list can be found at Newsweek.