LET THE SPOTLIGHT BE, JUST DON’T LET IT BLIND YOU
5 life lessons from the king of Bollywood, as thought-friends for a new age
1 BE THE LAST MAN (OR WOMAN) STANDING
“In my encounters with the tall gentleman with the baritone (Amitabh Bachchan) over the years, there is one lesson I have learnt: being a legend is not about how good-looking you are, how talented you are, or how wonderful you look in a bandgala. What matters is your ability to keep standing till the very last. In truth, a legend is one who has the strength to go on for years and years under constant public scrutiny.”
2 SPOTLIGHT ISN’T THE WHOLE OF YOUR LIFE
“The spotlight is just a small focused space on the stage. You’ve got to live your life with that awareness. Or your world shrinks and becomes extremely surreal. You have to accept the beauty, the gifts and the privileges that come with being in the spotlight. It fills you with experiences. You receive tremendous love from people. Accept it with grace, enable others to flourish and grow, and nurture the world around you.”
3 BEWARE OF THE FLIP SIDE OF POWER
“Keeping the spotlight on yourself, and thinking the rest of the world is somehow less deserving, is foolish. Because to be in the spotlight can also be extremely lonely, for power finally isolates. Things get constructed around it. People’s access to you, and your access to the world, gets cut off. Breaking that controlled access is important, because you can’t lose touch with the people you work for: the audience.”
4 IT’S ALL LUCK BY CHANCE
“People give advice on all sorts of things when you aren’t doing well: ‘Look like this, speak like that, do this film.’ It’s all hogwash. The simple truth is, at a certain point in life, you catch a public mood and by a happy accident, you embody it in your work. And it works, as it may have for me during the DDLJ phase. If you miss that moment, the mood of your audience and all your hard work just does not come together. It’s as simple as that.”
5 NOTHING HAPPENS WITHOUT HARD WORK
“When you are making and selling dreams, you are creating something that allows people to imagine their own possibilities. A star’s life looks glamorous, but that’s just the top layer. There is so much hard work beneath it. A failure breaks your heart because you have let people down. In that sense, a movie star’s life is evidence of the fact that you can’t escape hard work if you want to be successful.”