Anupam Kher’s self-conviction has always been greater than all his roles on screen—and in life. The 56 year-old hauled himself out of a dismal spell in his career and wrote a successful play based on his personal failures; started a film academy for aspiring actors and a charity trust for less privileged children; delivered motivational lectures at institutions around the world; and recently bagged a role in a big-budget Hollywood film. In his latest avatar, Kher has turned author with his debut book The Best Thing about You is You. The never-say-die spirit in him tells Rajashree Balaram why defeat is vital to triumph

 
Do you see the megalomaniac?” Anupam Kher asks us, pointing to the large black-and-white close-up of his face on a 6-ft flexboard, a promotional device for his debut book. The fierce pride in his eyes, however, is at odds with the wry self-deprecation in his voice. The pride is not misplaced, though—Kher is riding the crest of fame all over again; his book, The Best Thing about You is You, has made it to the best-selling league on popular online bookstore flipkart.com.

Part of the book’s success is the directness of prose. Kher steers clear of pedantic prescriptions on surmounting life’s challenges; instead, he inspires readers with confessions of his own failings and grit. And he sugar-coats nothing. “I think I am a very good actor,” he tells us with unaffected nonchalance. One would have balked at the declaration had it come from a lesser artist; but you can’t help but doff your hat at Kher when you size up his filmography, starting with his searing debut in Saaransh (1984) where he played an aggrieved 60 year-old father coming to terms with the loss of his son. Though he was only 29 then, his outburst of the visceral angst of an elderly parent was as real as it gets. Of course, premature balding too lent the required authenticity.

Kher’s hairline—or the lack of it—has often tinted public opinion of him as an avuncular figure. Up close, though, he looks years lighter, and faintly patrician. When we meet him at his film academy, Actor Prepares, in suburban Mumbai, he appears fit and trim, dressed in elegant casual wear. In the adjacent room, a choreography coach guides aspiring actors through the paces of a pulsing Bollywood number. The thump of the music and the coach’s staccato instructions filter into our meeting area. Yet Kher’s voice holds its own over the mild cacophony. It’s a soft voice that has honed its steel in a ruthless industry through the highs and lows of a consistently active career.

Thankfully, his years in tinsel-town have not dulled his childlike delight at life. He admits to being rooted to the spot when he met Robert De Niro a couple of months ago. (Kher recently finished shooting in Philadelphia for an upcoming film The Silver Linings Playbook, in which he plays a therapist to De Niro’s son.) Equally palpable is the wonder in his voice when he shares experiences of his early days spent sleeping on railways platforms, and his bafflement when he couldn’t think up enough ways to splurge his first salary cheque of ₹ 10,000. It’s also obvious that he still derives great pleasure in signing his autograph. “An actor is a guy, who if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening,” he quotes Marlon Brando as he scribbles an inscription for us on a copy of his book with practised flourish.

Kher is brave enough not to hide behind false modesty. The many gilded citations on his office wall are clearly there to reveal how far he has made it in life. But nestled between the certificates and medals is a sepia photo of his school days in small-town Shimla—perhaps reminding him, and us, of where he came from.

In his own words

 
I’m the luckiest man on earth because I could spend the first 18 years of my life with my grandfather. All my life I have wanted to be like him. My father is a very ordinary man who was extraordinary in his ordinariness. But my grandfather was a scholar. He was my reference point for Saaransh. I grew up listening to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata from him. That’s something I miss in families today. The joint family is no more, which is a dangerous trend. The more nuclear we become the more loony we are going to be; like people in the West, we’ll stop trusting people around us because we will be totally on our own.

I have spent many nights sleeping on the platform at Bandra railway station. I went through a lot of humiliation initially when I struggled to find some work. One day, in a fit of disillusionment, I wrote to my grandfather that I was planning to leave the city, that the city didn’t deserve me. He wrote back to me and reminded me how my father had once sold his watch to send me some money. He said, you have already gone through so much…bheega hua aadmi bearish se nahin darta (A man soaked to the bone doesn’t fear getting wet in the rain). The visual that these words painted in my mind was something that changed my life forever. That’s when I decided that I would not leave this city till I had achieved my dream.

I come from a lower middleclass family and today I meet people like Oprah Winfrey and presidents and billionaires. When I had my first shot with Robert De Niro, I had tears in my eyes. He is someone I have always worshipped as an actor. And there I was, sharing the same performance space with him. My grandfather used to say that if you are hardworking and truthful, you will always achieve what you want. Today, when I look back at my life I am amazed.

Of course, when I became successful I went berserk. And I am thankful that that happened. Because jab tak dimag kharab nahin hota, dimag theek kaise hoga? (If I hadn’t lost my mind, I wouldn’t have had a chance to come to my senses either.) I had never seen ₹ 10,000 in my whole life. So when I got that sum as my first salary for Saaransh, I didn’t know what to do. My brother Raju, a friend of mine and I decided to blow the whole thing up and went to a five-star hotel for an extravagant meal and beer. We were secretly thrilled that at the end of the meal we would be nonchalantly paying a bill that had run into a few thousands. And guess what? We only had to pay ₹ 847 [laughs] and we were left wondering what to do with the rest of it! I have never been so thrilled with money the way I was that day.

This city and the film industry always make you feel like an underachiever. I am not here because someone did a favour for me. I did it on my own. I used to walk from Bandra to Charni Road when I had no work. I share these hardships with my students all the time because I believe these experiences taught me something that no book could.

My book was not planned; it just happened. I had staged a play on my life called Kuch Bhi Ho Sakta Hai. In it I spoke about my failures, and my disasters. The world tries to frighten you with your failures, your disasters, and your shortcomings. And here I was talking about how I had gone bankrupt; ended up with a disaster when I made my first play; got thrown out of my first film 10 days before the shoot started; and battled with facial palsy. And through all of it, I was laughing! People found that very inspirational. It was a liberating experience. After seeing the play, some corporate firms and universities invited me for lectures. So I found another profession where I was being paid to speak.

I discovered that I was talking about how to cope with life and find strength within oneself. Later, when I went to Kelloggs, Cambridge, Oxford, IIT and IIM for lectures, I was the least educated of my audience—I am a third-class BA. But the gist of my life struck a chord with the audience—that the best thing about you is you. The easiest thing and the most difficult thing in the world are to be oneself. Soon Deccan Chronicle approached me to write a column. When I started receiving encouraging mails from readers, I took portions of those articles, elaborated them further and put them down for a book. The whole process took over a year. When the first copy was given to me, it was almost like holding one’s baby for the first time.

I have never read a motivational book in my life. The only book that ever inspired me was Lust for Life, artist Van Gogh’s biography. You cannot find success or peace by reading a book, but you can certainly encounter the brave in you by knowing that the best is within you. My book is essentially centred on communication, because every relationship is solely based on that. Today, we have millions of people on Facebook but how many of us have a true friend in our real lives? If what I have written makes a difference to even one person’s life, I would have achieved what I had set out to do. I was thrilled when someone recently tweeted to me, ‘You are a better writer than an actor.’

We evolve the way we choose to, not by circumstance. Words like ego, depression and boredom are false emotions we create to make ourselves feel important. Ego and pride are two different things. Ego gives you a sense of importance; pride, a sense of survival. I read a lot of quotations and fables. These things add to my evolution. If I do not evolve as a person, I am not letting myself evolve as an actor or writer.

I am foolish if I pretend in front of you. People who pretend are the ones who do not like themselves; they are so busy being someone else. I cannot suddenly change my demeanour or the way I speak because I wrote this book. I am who I am; I may be wrong in what I say, but I say it in all earnestness.

I believe things change when we speak up. I was asked to leave Saaransh 10 days before the shoot started as people at Rajashree Productions were keen to cast Sanjeev Kumar in the role. I was devastated. I packed my bags but then decided not to leave till I had given a piece of my mind to Mahesh Bhatt, the film’s director. I simply went to his house and told him he was the greatest fraud on earth. I was crying then. Bhatt stared at me intently and immediately changed the decision. I continue to be as greedy about my work today as I was when I started out. I am definitely calmer but not content.

People tell me that I do not depend on anyone so I must be a loner. I like being with people and I tend to have a habit of studying them, analysing them and trying to gauge what makes them tick. I lose interest in people when they stop being real. I may still be polite, nice and conversational but I switch off in my head.

Don’t let other people decide how ‘happening’ you are. You have to set your own benchmarks. There are so many people in remote villages who are doing wonderful work for children’s development and women’s empowerment. Their contributions or stature cannot be dwarfed simply because the newspapers do not write about them.

Going back to the place you grew up can sometimes be disturbing. You realise that you have moved on, but the life there has not moved at all. The streets, the silence, the way people talk…everything remains unchanged. Nostalgia is pain after all. There is a beautiful line in my film Daddy: Yaad karne par beeta hua sukh bhi dukhhee deta hai. [When you look back, even the happiness that you once enjoyed turns into a twinge of sadness.] But when I go to my school in Shimla and my old house which now stands demolished, I feel a sense of achievement. When I look at that house and then go to deliver a lecture at the Kellogg School of Management and see people looking up at me, it’s a great high that I have made it on my own.

Excerpt from The Best Thing About You is You
(Hay House; ₹ 399; 228 pages)

I have come across many people who are under the impression that merely attending self-coaching classes, or sitting at the feet of a guruji, a baba or a mataji, will make them self-realised individuals. Such an impression is far removed from the truth, just as if mere recitation of prayers will make us better human beings.

The main aspect is to realise, as I have explained before, that we have to be internally awake and conscious of every action and thought of ours. And the key word is ‘internal’, as without that internal will, no amount of external force can make us realise the power within us.

No one who has achieved any bit of success can deny that before the external obstacles were tackled, the journey to success had to begin by fighting the internal obstacles. These could be in the form of sloth, fears, low self-esteem, distractions, temptations, worries, past failures and so on.

As I write these words, I am reminded of my own internal conflicts, which I had to overcome on the road to achieving success. I had studied in a Hindi medium school and was not proficient in English. I was already balding at 23. Coming from a family of very modest means in Shimla, I was neither acquainted with the use of cutlery nor had been exposed to fine-dining experiences. One of my legs was marginally shorter than the other. I would think that such handicaps were quite a plateful for me to surmount.

But I did it.

In life, I have discovered, through analysing my experiences, that it is always the inner that shapes the outer. As someone asked me the other day, have you ever wondered over the preponderance of ‘ins’ in the language of self-realisation? Why is it w-in and not w-out, in-trospect and not out-rospect, in-tuition and not out-tuition, in-sight and not out-sight, inspiration and not out-spiration, in-stinct and not out-stinct? And the list goes on….

All great breakthroughs have always been from our thoughts which are internal: Whether it was that genius Greek mathematician, physicist and astronomer Archimedes of Syracuse discovering the principle of floatation, or the English astronomer Isaac Newton discovering gravity, or the Germany-born theoretical physicist Nobel laureate Albert Einstein enunciating his theory of relativity. The internals have ever been the subject of our sages who understood the importance thousands of years ago.

An immense amount of current research in advanced fields such as neurosciences has only proved the existence of the power within us, that even the best of us use barely 10 per cent of our mental capacity, and that the brain rewires itself continuously and is capable of learning new things at any age.

You cannot learn swimming by reading a book, you have to dive into the pool. So take a dive into the pool of life. You will not merely experience the change within; you will also unleash the power within.

Photo: Vilas Kalgutker
Featured in Harmony — Celebrate Age Magazine
April 2012