Shah Rukh Khan’s speech at the University of Edinburgh

Here is the speech in verbatim made by Shah Rukh Khan at the University of Edinburgh, UK: 

“Ladies and Gentlemen, 

It is indeed an honour for me to receive this doctorate today. “Humbled” is a word often used by people in my profession. I dislike the hypocritically obsequious connotation of it in these contexts so I’m not going to use it, but I will say that such occasions have a way of putting me right in my place! 

I get invited to conferences and inaugurations now and then to speak. When I receive the invitations, I also receive my brief. It’s usually about “success” and my “tips” on it (not my toes- those are covered by the “I will never show my toes” clause in my acting contracts. It’s my attempt at gender equality. My co-stars have no nipple clauses; I have a no toes one). 

Most people believe Bollywood stars aren’t insightful about anything other than the fateful occurrences that made them stars in the first place!

I’ve had the odd divergence from being taken for stupid though; recently I got an email from the International Association of Advertising It read, “Dear Mr. Khan, The advertising community would like you to address them on Globalization and disruptive marketing”. I spent the next 4 hours on Google trying to assimilate the “disruptiveness” of innovating a product to match its market? But it was one of those rare days when even Google can’t help you. A day when you need to leave Google and ask God for deliverance. But I have a film releasing soon, so I didn’t want to waste my quota of favours from God…believe you me, I need a big hit right about now. So I did the next best thing. I made a grand entry on my io hawk and told everybody, that there is nothing I can tell you that you already don’t know. You are such an august group of gathering…blah blah. Instead let me entertain you because you all deserve a break, and before the organizers could interject I started thrusting my pelvic into their faces and broke out into the one and only intellectual thing I know to do… The Lungi Dance. I got away with it without being “humbled” (it helps to be a better dancer than most advertisers ) and what’s more, they seemed to have a good time.

But that was a conference and this is a Doctorate from the prestigious University of Edinburgh. So I’m going to try to sound intelligent and insightful especially for you today. One of the subjects on the list of five I was sent for my speech today was: “Life Lessons” so for what its worth: here goes. Let me start at the very beginning.

Whatever I have learnt of life has been at the movies. Actually the first few films that I did in my career and their titles very nearly have formulated all that I believe one should pass on as Life lessons to students of a prestigious institutions like yours.

One of the first movies of my career was a movie called Deewana.

I fall in a love with a widow, who I meet literally by accident in which I very nearly kill her mother in law. I marry her. Not the mother in law but the widow. The widow is not keen on the marriage because she still loves her late husband but she marries me anyway. My rich mean father disapproves of this unison and does what a mean rich father does…tries to kill the widow. I am naturally disgusted by his behavior and after a long two page stand off with him, leave the house for good. Then for some reason apart from the fact that I ride my motorcycle without holding the handlebar I have an accident. Seeing me so forlorn and sad in the hospital bed my ex widow wife falls in love with me. There is something about sick men that always attracts women to them. The sicker the better. Then again by a chance of fate I rescue a stranger at night from a bunch of goons, and guess what?? He turns out to be the original husband of my ex widow wife, who hadn’t died inspite of his inheritance hungry uncle’s best efforts. Evil uncle then kidnaps me and my ex widow now not so ex present day wife to get hold of his nephew. I escape his clutches and come back with my wife’s undead husband to rescue her. By now she is strapped to a bomb and after a liberal round of fist fighting kicking and screaming the evil uncle is blown to smithereens by the very same bomb that he had strapped on status confused lady of the film. But not before the sacrificial ex-husband has done a kamikaze, unstrapping his ex-wife and set the bomb off killing himself in the bargain. All obstacles removed, our hero lives happily ever after with his beloved wife.

I’m not sure why the movie was called Deewana (which in Hindi means madness of a particularly nice/romantic kind) but I have a feeling it had something to do with the guy who came up with the plot!! So here’s my first life lesson, inspired by the movie title Deewana: Madness (of the particularly nice/romantic kind) is an absolute prerequisite to a happy and successful life. Don’t ever treat your little insanities as if they are aberrations that ought to be hidden from the rest of the world. Acknowledge them and use them to define your own way of living the only life you have. All the most beautiful people in the world, the most creative, the ones who led revolutions, who discovered and invented things, did so because they embraced their own idiosyncrasies. There’s no such thing as “normal”. That’s just another word for lifeless.

Soon after I acted in Deewana, I became the hapless hero of a movie called Chamatkar. This movie had a more believeable plot line. I get cheated off all my money by my best friend slash, conman and find myself asleep in a cemetery only to be awakened by the ghost of a murdered mobster. A ghost that only I can see and nobody else. I am very perceptive that way. Anyway the mobster ghost helps me get a job as a teacher through his ghostly good offices. I fall in love with his daughter from a wife that has passed on after being duped by his flunky. Together, the ghost and I organize a cricket match, yes I was doing that even before I owned a cricket team, and avenge the various misdeeds done to us by bashing up the flunky and the conman, forgive them and let each other descend into the respective abodes where we belong. He goes back to the grave and I go away with the babe. Now Chamatkar, means miracle: right and straightforward without any nuances. So my next lesson is the following: If you ever find yourself cheated of all your money and sleeping on a grave, do not fear, a miracle is near, either that or a ghost.

All you have to do is fall asleep! In other words, no matter how bad it gets, life IS the miracle you are searching for. There is no other one around the corner. Develop the faith in it to let it take its own course, make all the effort you can to abide by its beauty and it will not let you down. Use every resource you have been given, your mental faculties, the ability of your heart to love and feel for those around you, your health and good fortune: all of the thousands of gifts life has given you to their maximum potential. Honour your life. Honour each gift and each moment by not laying it to waste. There is no real measure of success in this world except the ability to make good of life’s endowments to you.

Sometimes life’s gifts arrive wrapped in all the wrong damned wrapping too, at which point we have to learn to do two things with them: recognize them for what they are and gamble on our fear that they might be disasters. This brings me to my third life lesson inspired by two movies in which I played the anti-hero: Darr and Bazigar.

Twenty years ago, in the Indian movie industry, roles were very clearly defined. They provided the security of your stardom in a sense. If you’d been successful playing an “angry young man”, you’d pretty much be angry and young for the rest of your career. If you’d been a police inspector in three movies, odds were, you’d be one in the next 33 too. This applied to female stars as well: wives were wives, seductresses-seductresses, mother in laws- mother in laws, and so on. Few actors would have willingly switched from romantic heroes to obsessively violent lovers. I took the leap…not because I was particularly brave, but because ( a very dear director friend of mine sat me down and told me I was ugly. And being ugly necessarily meant I do bad guy roles. I wasn’t the romantic hero types, he said, actually he used the words, that my face was not chocolaty enough, whatever that meant.) So I started to eat a lot of chocolate and while waiting for it to take effect, I jumped into bad guy roles. Darr means fear in Hindi and everyone always tells you that you ought to be brave so I’m not going to bore you with that idea. Instead let me tell you this: Being brave means being shit scared all the way to the party but getting there and doing the Funky Chicken in front of all your teenage kid’s friends anyway. Let me just add on behalf of all the fathers of the world who have embarrassed their children by doing this…it takes a lot of bravery resolve and grit to do this.

So do it. Don’t let your fears become boxes that enclose you. Open them out, feel them and turn them into the greatest courage you are capable of. I promise you, nothing will go wrong. But if you live by your fears, everything that can possibly go wrong will go wrong and you wont even have done the Funky Chicken.

While we’re on what everyone tells you to be, let me also say that all the planning in the world, won’t take you where you want to get to. It’s fine not to know what you want to be twenty years from now. Most of those who had it all figured out became bankers anyway. Oh this will appear on YouTube right?? There goes my next big loan for the film from my friendly neighbourhood bank.

I did a movie once called Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, in which I was the victim of a lover’s confusions and my next lesson is precisely that. It’s ok to be confused. Confusion is the route to all the clarity in the world. Don’t worry about it too much and don’t ever take yourself seriously enough to be so clear about your own ideas that you stop respecting other people’s. Our values are our values, they don’t make us any better than anyone else, at best they make us different. Always try to see the other person’s truth because like every movie has a story, every human being has one too and you have no right to imagine that yours is better than anyone else’s. You can leave that silliness to my esteemed colleagues and me!!

And if you thought the last two stories I told you were crazy, here’s another one in the reckoning for the Oscar for weirdest screenplay: Guddu. Guddu was my name in a movie about loving and giving in which basically, I have an accident (yes another one) but this time instead of almost wiping out my future mother in law, I wipe out my girlfriend’s eyes. Many convoluted sub-plots including a life threatening brain tumour, a legal battle for the right to donate organs and a fast unto death, my lawyer father, my religious mother and I are battling over which one of us will donate our eyes to my blind girlfriend. In the end, I recover miraculously and my mother dies donating her eyes to my girlfriend and we all live happily ever after. Life lesson number four rears its head: Give of yourself to others. And while you’re at it, make sure you realise that you aren’t doing anyone any favours by being kind. It’s all just to make you feel that sneaky little twinge that comes from being utterly pleased with yourself. After all, the one that gets the most benefit out of any act of kindness or charity that you do will always be you. I don’t say this, as many see it, in a transactive or karmic way. Its not an “I do good, I get benefit” equation with some white bearded figure taking notes from the heavens above. It’s a simple truth. An act of goodness becomes worthless when you assign a brownie point to yourself for it, no matter how subtly you allow yourself to do so. As benevolent as your gesture might be; someone else could have made it too. Regardless of how rich, successful and famous you become, don’t ever underestimate the grace that other people bestow upon you just by being the recipients of your kindnesses. You might be able to buy your friend a Rolls for his/her birthday but its no substitute for a patient hearing of your sulky rants on a bad hair day.

Sometimes things just happen, as encapsulated in another movie title of mine: Kuch Kuch Hota Hai; and you know what? They don’t always add up (that would be “One Two Ka four” as the list of titles continues). So my fifth lesson is this: when life hits you with all the force of its resplendent rage, the Rolls isn’t going to give you comfort. A friend’s grace will, and if you can’t find resolution as easily as you would like to, don’t panic. Everything evolves as you go along, Chalte- Chalte as we say in Hindi (and yes, that was another movie I did but no more mad plots for God’s sake!!)

Even disasters eventually resolve themselves. Give life the space to move at its own pace, pushing it ahead only by way of being kind to yourself when you are hurting or in despair. You don’t always have to figure things out or find an explanation for the circumstances you are in. It’s more prudent to accept that sometimes there just isn’t one. “Ram Jaane” (God knows), as we say in Hindi and as a priest responded to my orphan-child character when i asked him, what my name was, in a movie of the same appellation. The boy plodded through three entire hours of film referring to himself by that fatalistic phrase and why not? Who says that what we call ourselves is any definition of who we really are? And that’s lesson number six for you: All the names you give yourself, or those that others call you, are just labels. You are not defined by them no matter how flattering or uncomplimentary they are. What defines you is your heart.

Ask The Artist Formerly Known As Prince!! And learn a thing or two from him, if you don’t believe this insanely sexy Indian Superstar standing in front of you. And I say this out of experience because if I was to go by what all I am called on Social Media I would be an old desperate manipulative has been star who swings both ways while making crap movies, and these are just the good mentions.

If you aren’t charged up about doing something, if you don’t have what in Hindi we call the “Josh”, the fire in your belly for it, then don’t do it. It’s a waste of your time and more importantly, of those who pin their hopes on your endeavours too. Redefine yourself if you have to but do it on your own terms and just get on with it. In fact, like my character in the movie My Name is Khan, don’t forget where you came from and who you really are. It ought to be the compass by which you navigate through life’s vicissitudes. The North that keeps you oriented despite a series of misfortunes or a shower of privilege.

One of the biggest hits I made was an unexpected one and for once the plot was neither meandering nor barking mad. I was the coach of a beleaguered women’s hockey team that went on to overcome its struggles and win a world championship. Its title was Chak De, an inspirational martial cry that Sikh soldiers used while lifting logs in order to make bridges across rivers on their campaigns against their enemies. It implies the will to get up and get on with it, which brings me to life lesson number seven: whatever it is that is pulling you back, its not going away unless you stand up and start forging your own path with all your might in the opposite direction. Stop whining and start moving, so to speak. Sadness and happiness have the same quality of transience. Life is a balanced exchange of one with the other. And this is lesson number eight: Don’t attach yourself to either, they’re both going to change with the same certitude. Take them with the ephemeral spirit of their impermanence and manage them with a healthy dose of good humour. Laugh at yourself when you are despairing, shed a tear or two when one of my movie plots makes you hysterical with laughter (we did actually consider Guddu donating a single eye to his blind girlfriend and both of them waltzing into the sunset eye patch to eye patch). Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham was the title of an Indian style family drama in which I was one of many heroes and it means just that: to be happy sometimes, and sad others, is the very beauty of a life lived in full measure. Why fail yourself by desiring one emotion and detesting the other?

You know, I’ve acted in over 50 full length movies, if I took you through a journey of each title, we’d be sitting here forever and you’d all end up fast asleep (this wonderful venue being most un-cemetery like notwithstanding) so I’ll wrap up with my last two lessons.

Live from the heart. Dil Se. Love. Love people, love the world around you, love animals and birds, and big cities and mountains, love dreams, love life, love your work, your friends and your enemies even if you feel least like it. Most importantly, my friends; love yourselves. Embrace all that this life has in store for you, let your heart be as deep as the deepest ocean and as wide as the farthest horizon. Know that it is limitless. Love is not an excuse to grab or to hold or to own or to barter. It is the only excuse you will ever have to call yourself special. And if someone you love lets you down, don’t fault yourself for not trusting him, fault yourself for not trusting your love enough to forgive his/her trespasses.

You never know what the future will bring, whether there will be a tomorrow or not. I died at a shockingly young age in a movie called Kal Ho Na Ho which means exactly that. And I wasn’t even a smoker!!! I never let my two older children watch it to the end, we even filmed a whole alternate ending especially for them. But now they have grown up and like all of you, will soon be embarking on a wondrous journey of their own. Instead of trying to protect them from life, the wiser and older version of me grabs every chance to tell them: live as hard as you can in this very moment. Live now. Live today. You may not see it with your youthful eyes, but NOW is as much time as you will ever get. Because tomorrow we will all be dead. And just in case there is no cycle of rebirth etc…why take a chance. I don’t want to end this on a cynical note by reminding you about the reality of death. I want to let you all know that how important your today…your now is. Study hard. Work hard. Play harder. Don’t be bound by rules…don’t hurt anybody and never ever live somebody else’s dream. Remember however many times you go wrong, no matter how many times you fail, despair, feel like this world is against you….in the words of Bob Marley…at the end everythings gonna be alright. And in my words. “ Hindi filmon ki tarah life mein bhi, anth mein sab kuch theek ho jaata hai. Aur agar na ho, toh woh anth nahi hai…picture abhi baaki hai mere doston.” Take it as the only truth you need to know. Take it and believe it because the most unlikely to make it in Bollywoood is telling you this…the most romantic hero who doesn’t look anything like chocolate or taste like it.

“Now” all you bored professors out there in the first row, come on up: lets do the Lungi Dance!!!”  

News & Image Courtesy: http://indianexpress.com

Working on New Year resolutions!

Preparing a long list of new year resolutions for 2015! ;)

An Honest Speech On Success and Failure by Shah Rukh Khan @ AIMA

I am going to say good evening again, because that's how I started the speech. First of all, it's really scary here. Some of the biggest managers of the biggest corporations in the biggest convention for management - AIMA.

It's very sad that in such an august company of people, big business houses and managers, all you could manage was to get a speaker from Bollywood to speak at the convention. The economy must be really bad.

Well, who am I to speak about the economic downtrend across the globe etc, or anything, for that matter? Just reading the topics being discussed before I came on stage, I was frightened. And if I'm allowed to say so, shit scared. I couldn't understand a word. Let me tell you one of the discussions they had earlier on in the day - 'Could financialisation of commodities be used to incentivise supply growth without inflating prices?'

Okay, if you say so. Or no, if you guys are in a bad mood, whatever you say. The other one - 'Managing liquidity supply crunch risk of NPA CSR mandate CEOs COOs CFOs UFOs'... mind-boggling and numbing for a person like me who can just about say, k-k-k-k-corporation management. And the topic that my friend Shiv (D Shivakumar, president, AIMA) told me is, I have to speak about courage, in this scared state and ill-informed mindset. But here I am, and so are all of you wonderful people. I wish you a great convention and a happy economy, and I want to thank my friend Shiv for giving me this opportunity to speak in front of such an extraordinary amazement of grey matter - all of you highly successful, perhaps the most successful people in the world - and he chose me to give you a speech on success. Am I the only one seeing the irony here? Or are you all too busy holding back your laughter on what I'm going to say?

Apart from my lack of knowledge and fear, the only other thing is that I'm not good at giving discourses on how to succeed. I don't know what I'm going to say to you highly motivated people that you don't already know about life. So I'll bore you with a few details of my life. But let me warn you, this is a recycled speech. It's generic and it's simple.

Successful people are almost never able to pinpoint what it was that made them so. Take Warren Buffet. Here's a guy who must get asked five times a day how he became the most successful investor of his era. His answers? 'Reinvest your profits, limit what you borrow' - are no different from what any fool could tell you. But he's not being cagey - he simply doesn't know. Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it, perhaps we even deserve it, but we don't acquire anything from it. And maybe that's why, it cannot be passed on either. Being successful does not mean my children will also be so, however much I teach them what all did in my life, and they follow it to the letter.

Success just happens, really. So, talking about how to become successful is a waste of time. So let me tell you, very honestly, whatever happened to me, happened because I'm really scared of failure. I don't want as much to succeed, as much I don't want to fail. I come from a very normal middle/lower middle-class family, and I saw a lot of failure. My father was a beautiful man, and the most successful failure in the world. My mom also failed to stay with me long enough to see me become a movie star. We were quite poor, actually - at certain junctures of our lives, I had even experienced what we call in Delhi a kudki - how many of you know about it? This is a thing that the government does when you don't pay the rent of your house, and they throw you and your stuff on the roads.

Let me tell you, poverty is not an ennobling experience at all. Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes, depression. I've seen my parents go through it many times - it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. At an early age after my parents died, I equated poverty with failure. I just didn't want to be poor. So when I got a chance to act in films, it wasn't out of any creative desire that I signed my films - it was just purely out of the fear of failure and poverty. Most of them were discards of other actors and the producers could not find anyone else to do them. Deewana, which was my first hit, was actually discarded by an actor called Arman Kohli. Baazigar was rejected by Mr Salman Khan, and Darr was negated by Mr Aamir Khan. I did them all just to make sure I was working. The timing or something was right, and that made it happen that I became a big star.

I asked Dilip Kumar sa'ab one day - we were watching Devdas together - and I said, 'Sir, yeh joh picture aapne ki hai, itni achhi acting...' I had made my own version of Devdas, and I was sitting next to him, and I said, 'Sir, yeh picture jo aapne ki hai, bahut achhi hai. Kyun ki aapne? Aapko yeh character kyun achha laga?' And he looked at me and he said, 'Pata nahin yaar, bas thoda sa... kya thaa woh... Bimalda ek lakh rupaye de rahe the mujhko...' That was the only reason he did Devdas at that point of time. Of course he's the greatest actor the world will ever see, but at that point of time, that's all he wanted. That sometimes, our success is not the direct result of our actions. It just happens on its own, and we take the credit for it, out of embarrassment sometimes.

So I believe the true road to success is not the desire for success, but the fear of failure. I tell everyone, if you don't enjoy and be afraid of your failure hard enough, you will never succeed. I'm not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun, but I will insist and hope that all of us will experience it in some measure. The extent of what each one of us perceives as failure must differ, as it should, but I believe that everyone should pass through some stages of failure before they succeed. So how does one fail?

I'm sorry, this is what I teach my kids, so if it sounds a little novice and silly, please excuse me. First and foremost, it's not the absence of failure that makes you a success, it is your response to failure that actually helps to buffer the reverses you experience. I myself have two responses to failure. First is pragmatism. I believe that if one approach does not work, another one might, as in business, too. The second response is fatalism. I fool myself that it was bound to happen, and that I need to move on, and not get caught up in the oft-repeated question - 'God, why does it happen to me?' It happened, move on.

Failure also gives me an incentive to greater exertion, harder work, which invariably leads to greater success in most cases. Failure is an amazing teacher. If you don't fail, you will never learn. And if you don't learn, you will never grow. There is a well-known story of a bank president who was asked the secret of his success, and he said, "Right decisions". How do you get to know how to make the right decisions, came the follow-up question. "Experience," was the answer. Well, how do you get experience, asked his interrogator. "Wrong decisions," he replied.

Sometimes, it has also taught me to stop pretending that I'm someone other than what I'm supposed to be. It gives me a clear-cut direction that 'Hey, maybe I'm not supposed to be doing this. Let me just concentrate on doing and finishing things that really matter to me that really define me, instead of following a particular course that's actually taking me away from what my core liking is'. KKR, my cricket team - and Shiv knows this - is one such example. Till friends like him gave me advice, I was doing everything. Then I got myself a COO, set up a whole new department, and the job I think has been handled much better than what I think I was (doing). And I'm willing to accept that.

Failure also gets you to find out who your real friends are. The true strength of your relationships only gets tested in the face of strong adversity. I lost a lot of friends post-Ra.One, apart from losing a lot of audience too. And post-Chennai Express, even though I've made no new friends, I have a whole new set of enemies, which is also interesting to know.

Regular failures have also taught me empathy towards others. Being a star, it is easy for me to be prone to the notion that I'm superior, self-sufficient and fantastic, instead of realising that I was just plain lucky or got some lucky breaks. Overcoming some of my failures has made me discover that I have a strong will, and (am) more disciplined than I suspected. It has helped me have confidence in my ability to survive. So, all in all, I think failure is a good thing.

I won't bore you with more details of how failure is a good thing because you won't call me back for a talk on success. But I'd like to tell you all that life is not just a checklist of acquisitions, attainments and fulfilments. Your qualifications and CVs don't matter, your jobs don't matter. Instead, life is difficult and complicated and beyond your control, and to know that with humility, respecting your failures will help you survive its vicissitudes.

There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures in life. I say making because I believe failure is not an exterior force. I believe it happens due to our own actions, our own reactions, in such convoluted ways sometimes that we may not understand, but we are the reason for it. So don't be weighed down by it - relish it, cherish it, the experience, and learn from it. By accepting it all and experiencing it will you experience success, not in isolation of life's full offerings.

Let me conclude by saying that my hope for you is a lifelong love of learning, exciting and inspiring projects, dreams, businesses, profits, power lunches or whatever turns you guys and girls on. But alongside, I wish you a fair number of moderate failures. By experiencing all, I hope that you will experience success. Success is never final, just like failure is never fatal. Courage is ill-defined if you think it means doing something macho, risky or chancy. If that happens at somebody else's cost, it's even less courageous. Courage is doing whatever you are afraid to do - personally scared to do - in whichever capacity you work. There can be no courage unless you are scared. So be scared to feel courage, be fearful.

I believe one has to have the fear of failure so much that you get the courage to succeed. And that, my friends, is my learned piece of courage in success or what I call the success of failure, and being scared enough to be courageous, to make it so. Or if I were to put it into words that surround me, when I entered here and I was scared of all this corporate jargon that I heard, 'This is my theory of the management of high-rising failure to convert it into success by growth index of 100%, while understanding the indices of fear and not compromising the syntax of our courage globally while keeping a holistic 360 degree view of our domestic market through rigorous system and processes.'

In simple terms or film language, which is what I do - 'If at first you don't succeed, reload and try again. Shoot fast, shoot first and be ready to take a bullet too. And remember what Don said - "Iss company ke management ke dushman ki sabse badi galti yeh hai, ki woh is company ka dushman hai. Kyunki jab tak dushman apni pehli chaal chalta hai, yeh company apni agli chaal chaal chuki hoti hai."'

Courtesy - Times of India.

ഒരു നല്ല ചിന്ത...

പക്ഷേ ... ഇന്ത്യ എന്റ്റെ അമ്മയല്ലേ ? എന്നെ പ്രസവിച്ച എൻറ്റെ അമ്മ എന്നെ പ്രതീക്ഷിക്കുന്നതുപോലെ ഭാരതവും എന്നെ പ്രതീക്ഷിക്കുന്നില്ലേ ? ഭാരതഭൂമി മരിച്ച എന്നെയും , എന്നെ പ്രസവിച്ച എന്റ്റെ അമ്മ ജീവിച്ചിരിക്കുന്ന എന്നെയും. പ്രതീക്ഷ!

~ വൈക്കം മുഹമ്മദ്‌ ബഷീർ , 'ഓർമ്മക്കുറിപ്പ്‌'

~ Eid Mubarak ~

~ Eid Mubarak ~

May the blessings of Almighty Allah (God) be always with you, your family and your beloved ones.

~ Chaand Mubarak ~

A Very Nice Thought for You

Recently I came across a very nice thought from Paulo Coelho's 'Maktub'.

You can imagine a flock of birds, but the number of birds in the flock is beyond your control. Yet the scene was clear, well-defined, exact. There must be an answer to the question. Who was it that determined how many birds should appear in the imagined scene? Not you!

Ban Endosulfan or It Will Kill Us All Sooner or Later!

Even though I support UDF & UPA , I have uncompromisingly sharp dispute with them on their attitude towards Endosulfan & GM crops. It's as if they are asking for more deaths or perhaps the death of all (!) to ban Endosulfan! The side effects of Endosulfan are pretty clear. Still waiting for what?  Do the human lives shattered through that insecticide have no value at all? Still need more study to ban it from this democratic country? They have taken a more or less similar attitude towards Genetically Modified (GM) crops as well! 

Ban Endosulfan & GM Crops from India. Every human life is precious. 

വെറുതെ വന്ന ഒരു ചിന്ത...

ഇത്രയും നാള്‍ എനിക്ക് മഴയേക്കാള്‍ പ്രിയപെട്ടവളായി ആരും ഇല്ല എന്ന് അഹങ്കരിച്ചു നടക്കുകയായിരുന്നു അവള്‍. എന്നാല്‍ ഇന്നു പെയ്തു തുടങ്ങും മുന്‍പ് ഒരു കുസൃതി എന്നോണം  എന്നോട് ചോദിച്ചു. ഉത്തരം  ഞാന്‍ പറയും മുന്‍പ് മനസിലാക്കിയതിനാലാവണം, ഒന്ന് ചെറുതായി ചാറുക പോലും ചെയ്യാതെ എന്നോട് പിണങ്ങി പോയികഴിഞ്ഞിരുന്നു.

Jan Lokpal Bill, Anna Hazare & New Hope

I support Jan Lokpal Bill, Anna Hazare and his noble cause.

Actually it is a new hope. A new hope against corruption and being exploited. 

No one in India supports corruption except those who delayed the Bill for the past decades! As a matter of fact no party which ruled the country made an effort to legalize Lokpal Bill. We all know the reason! 

Someone recently said the bill is against democracy! So what about corruption and being exploited?!!

Anna Hazare is the real Hero. A hero who showed great courage and stood firm on what he believes in. (Some people even tried to play politics in this noble cause too! But Anna Hazare utilized the situation to the world that he is the real hero!)

Millions of people who supported your cause via different ways showed that India being awaken. Indians felt a new feeling of being rejuvenated and we will keep the spark ignited. Hats off. Once again, you are the real hero, real patriot, real India.

Shinu

Urumi - Malayalam Movie Review - Good but not Best

'Urumi' is good but not the best! Good because of many things like direction, cinematography, casting, art direction, dialogue, action, songs etc etc. Not best, because it really lacks a strong storyline, a strong script and a strong patriotic feel that we all expected. Actions sequences are taken very well with much technical perfection.

Director-Santhosh Sivan really deserves appreciation. He made a good piece of art indeed. The movie is pretty worth watching. That won't be an exaggeration if someone says director deserves all claps. Actually it's a director's piece of work! Deepak's song 'aaro ne aaro' is superb & bgm could have been made better!

Genelia played a strong character named 'Ayisha' and she is at her best, I think. Really liked it. I dare to rank her number three in my favorite actress list following Nicole Kidman in 'Australia' and Julia Roberts in 'Notting Hill'. Once I loved Sarah Ashley from 'Australia' & Anna Scot from 'Notting Hill'! Now I love Ayisha from Urumi!!! Actually I was not a Genelia fan before!

Shinu