Authored by Rahul Bose, Actor, Director, Rugby player and Founder of a NGO
I think it was predestined as a child that I would have at least two lives. From infancy, my ability to play sport and a natural flair for acting/elocution /debating paralleled each other. And yet, there was never a point where I ever thought either field could be a career option - we weren't raised that way. Sport and acting weren't the career options as they are today. They were considered luxuries, cherries on the cake that was to be your 'real' career, whether engineering, medicine, or banking. Through a series of fortuitous circumstances, which are too long winded (and bizarre!) to narrate in this blog, I found myself playing international rugby for India from 1998-2009 and becoming a full-time actor (and then director) since 1993. People often ask me how I juggle the two. Well, when I was playing rugby for India that would be my first priority and so I used to look at the tournaments we were playing in the next 12 months and ensure I took no films that would clash with the month's training leading up to the test matches and the duration of the tourney itself. What was really difficult was juggling the two physically - on three films my producers have had to postpone shooting by weeks to allow my broken nose/broken bones to heal! People also ask me whether I take lessons from one field and use them in the other. Sure. From rugby, I learned to deal with pressure with a cool head. So, whenever there was a crisis on a shoot, I would learn to switch off from it and not let it interfere with my performance. From acting, I learned patience. Most of screen acting is waiting - waiting for a shot, waiting for a film to release, waiting for the next offer. I was hot headed, impetuous, and impatient for results as a rugby captain in my early days. Gradually, I learned the value of being patient - working hard every day and not looking for immediate results but focusing on the longer term benefits of the process.And then came my passion for giving back to this world. That was something I certainly wasn't born with. When you are born in comfort, in a posh part of South Bombay, study in one of the country's finest schools, the last thing you care about are the poor and the disadvantaged. A deep sense of compassion grew in me from the time the riots occurred in Mumbai in 1992. I couldn't understand how people could turn into murderers in the name of religion. We were taught that all the religions of the world preached peace, compassion and love. That was when I began to think of how we could make this world and our country a more peaceful, more loving place, and this resulted in me starting The Foundation in 2006. Today, we have kids from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Kashmir and Manipur, who we put through the best, most inclusive, most loving schools in the country and once they are fully qualified (15-17 years later), they go back and become leaders and changemakers in their communities, homelands and states, so that one day we will boast of an India where no child and no adult has lesser opportunities than the other.
Those then are the three strands of my life that give me the greatest happiness, reward and peace that I could ever ask for. Whenever I am involved in any of these three pursuits, I never think I am 'working' because it's all I ever want to do! Even if I had discovered just one of these pursuits in my life, I would have considered myself blessed, but three? Wow. But I have to confess it all started with my mad love for sport and my deep thirst for acting. Those are really my #TwoKaDum. They defined the Rahul Bose aged 6 years old and they define the Rahul Bose of today. All I can hope for is that they stay with me till I breathe my last. What a reward that would be!
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