Thoughts on humanity fame and love Shah Rukh Khan
Namaskar.
I’m a movie star, I’m 51 years of age,
and I don’t use Botox as yet.
(Laughter)
So I’m clean, but I do behave like you saw
like a 21-year-old in my movies.
Yeah, I do that.
I sell dreams, and I peddle love
to millions of people back home in India
who assume that I’m
the best lover in the world.
(Laughter)
If you don’t tell anyone,
I’m going to tell you I’m not,
but I never let that assumption go away.
(Laughter)
I’ve also been made to understand
there are lots of you here
who haven’t seen my work,
and I feel really sad for you.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
That doesn’t take away from the fact
that I’m completely self-obsessed,
as a movie star should be.
(Laughter)
That’s when my friends,
Chris and Juliet called me here
to speak about the future “you.”
Naturally, it follows I’m going
to speak about the present me.
(Laughter)
Because I truly believe
that humanity is a lot like me.
(Laughter)
It is. It is.
It’s an aging movie star,
grappling with all
the newness around itself,
wondering whether
it got it right in the first place,
and still trying to find a way
to keep on shining regardless.
I was born in a refugee colony
in the capital city of India, New Delhi.
And my father was a freedom fighter.
My mother was, well,
just a fighter like mothers are.
And much like the original homo sapiens,
we struggled to survive.
When I was in my early 20s,
I lost both my parents,
which I must admit
seems a bit careless of me now,
but –
(Laughter)
I do remember the night my father died,
and I remember the driver of a neighbor
who was driving us to the hospital.
He mumbled something
about “dead people don’t tip so well”
and walked away into the dark.
And I was only 14 then,
and I put my father’s dead body
in the back seat of the car,
and my mother besides me,
I started driving back
from the hospital to the house.
And in the middle of her quiet crying,
my mother looked at me and she said,
“Son, when did you learn to drive?”
And I thought about it
and realized, and I said to my mom,
“Just now, Mom.”
(Laughter)
So from that night onwards,
much akin to humanity in its adolescence,
I learned the crude tools of survival.
And the framework of life was
very, very simple then, to be honest.
You know, you just ate what you got
and did whatever you were told to do.
I thought celiac was a vegetable,
and vegan, of course, was Mr. Spock’s
lost comrade in “Star Trek.”
(Laughter)
You married the first girl that you dated,
and you were a techie if you could fix
the carburetor in your car.
I really thought that gay was
a sophisticated English word for happy.
And Lesbian, of course, was the capital
of Portugal, as you all know.
(Laughter)
Where was I?
We relied on systems
created through the toil and sacrifice
of generations before
to protect us,
and we felt that governments
actually worked for our betterment.
Science was simple and logical,
Apple was still then just a fruit
owned by Eve first and then Newton,
not by Steve Jobs, until then.
And “Eureka!” was what you screamed
when you wanted
to run naked on the streets.
You went wherever life took you for work,
and people were mostly welcoming of you.
Migration was a term then
still reserved for Siberian cranes,
not human beings.
Most importantly, you were who you were
and you said what you thought.
Then in my late 20s,
I shifted to the sprawling
metropolis of Mumbai,
and my framework,
like the newly industrialized
aspirational humanity,
began to alter.
In the urban rush for a new,
more embellished survival,
things started to look a little different.
I met people who had descended
from all over the world,
faces, races, genders, money-lenders.
Definitions became more and more fluid.
Work began to define you at that time
in an overwhelmingly equalizing manner,
and all the systems
started to feel less reliable to me,
almost too thick to hold on
to the diversity of mankind
and the human need to progress and grow.
Ideas were flowing
with more freedom and speed.
And I experienced the miracle
of human innovation and cooperation,
and my own creativity,
when supported by the resourcefulness
of this collective endeavor,
catapulted me into superstardom.
I started to feel that I had arrived,
and generally, by the time I was 40,
I was really, really flying.
I was all over the place.
You know? I’d done 50 films by then
and 200 songs,
and I’d been knighted by the Malaysians.
I had been given the highest civil honor
by the French government,
the title of which for the life of me
I can’t pronounce even until now.
(Laughter)
I’m sorry, France, and thank you,
France, for doing that.
But much bigger than that,
I got to meet Angelina Jolie –
(Laughter)
for two and a half seconds.
(Laughter)
And I’m sure she also remembers
that encounter somewhere.
OK, maybe not.
And I sat next to Hannah Montana
on a round dinner table
with her back towards me most of the time.
Like I said, I was flying,
from Miley to Jolie,
and humanity was soaring with me.
We were both pretty much
flying off the handle, actually.
And then you all know what happened.
The internet happened.
I was in my late 40s,
and I started tweeting
like a canary in a birdcage
and assuming that, you know,
people who peered into my world
would admire it
for the miracle I believed it to be.
But something else
awaited me and humanity.
You know, we had expected
an expansion of ideas and dreams
with the enhanced
connectivity of the world.
We had not bargained
for the village-like enclosure of thought,
of judgment, of definition
that flowed from the same place
that freedom and revolution
was taking place in.
Everything I said took a new meaning.
Everything I did – good, bad, ugly –
was there for the world
to comment upon and judge.
As a matter of fact,
everything I didn’t say or do also
met with the same fate.
Four years ago,
my lovely wife Gauri and me
decided to have a third child.
It was claimed on the net
that he was the love child
of our first child
who was 15 years old.
Apparently, he had sown
his wild oats with a girl
while driving her car in Romania.
And yeah, there was
a fake video to go with it.
And we were so disturbed as a family.
My son, who is 19 now,
even now when you say “hello” to him,
he just turns around and says,
“But bro, I didn’t even have
a European driving license.”
(Laughter)
Yeah.
In this new world,
slowly, reality became virtual
and virtual became real,
and I started to feel
that I could not be who I wanted to be
or say what I actually thought,
and humanity at this time
completely identified with me.
I think both of us
were going through our midlife crisis,
and humanity, like me,
was becoming an overexposed prima donna.
I started to sell everything,
from hair oil to diesel generators.
Humanity was buying everything
from crude oil to nuclear reactors.
You know, I even tried
to get into a skintight superhero suit
to reinvent myself.
I must admit I failed miserably.
And just an aside I want to say
on behalf of all the Batmen, Spider-Men
and Supermen of the world,
you have to commend them,
because it really hurts in the crotch,
that superhero suit.
(Laughter)
Yeah, I’m being honest.
I need to tell you this here.
Really.
And accidentally, I happened
to even invent a new dance form
which I didn’t realize,
and it became a rage.
So if it’s all right,
and you’ve seen a bit of me,
so I’m quite shameless, I’ll show you.
It was called the Lungi dance.
So if it’s all right, I’ll just show you.
I’m talented otherwise.
(Cheers)
So it went something like this.
Lungi dance. Lungi dance.
Lungi dance. Lungi dance.
Lungi dance. Lungi dance.
Lungi dance. Lungi dance.
Lungi dance. Lungi dance.
Lungi dance. Lungi.
That’s it. It became a rage.
(Cheers)
It really did.
Like you notice, nobody could make
any sense of what was happening except me,
and I didn’t give a damn, really,
because the whole world,
and whole humanity,
seemed as confused and lost as I was.
I didn’t give up then.
I even tried to reconstruct
my identity on the social media
like everyone else does.
I thought if I put on
philosophical tweets out there
people will think I’m with it,
but some of the responses I got
from those tweets
were extremely confusing acronyms
which I didn’t understand. You know?
ROFL, LOL.
“Adidas,” somebody wrote back
to one of my more thought-provoking tweets
and I was wondering
why would you name a sneaker,
I mean, why would you write back
the name of a sneaker to me?
And I asked my 16-year-old daughter,
and she enlightened me.
“Adidas” now means
“All day I dream about sex.”
(Laughter)
Really.
I didn’t know if you know that.
So I wrote back,
“WTF” in bold to Mr. Adidas,
thanking secretly that some acronyms
and things won’t change at all.
WTF.
But here we are.
I am 51 years old, like I told you,
and mind-numbing acronyms notwithstanding,
I just want to tell you
if there has been a momentous time
for humanity to exist,
it is now,
because the present you is brave.
The present you is hopeful.
The present you
is innovative and resourceful,
and of course, the present you
is annoyingly indefinable.
And in this spell-binding,
imperfect moment of existence,
feeling a little brave
just before I came here,
I decided to take
a good, hard look at my face.
And I realized that I’m beginning
to look more and more
like the wax statue of me
at Madame Tussaud’s.
(Laughter)
Yeah, and in that moment of realization,
I asked the most central
and pertinent question to humanity and me:
Do I need to fix my face?
Really. I’m an actor, like I told you,
a modern expression of human creativity.
The land I come from
is the source of inexplicable
but very simple spirituality.
In its immense generosity,
India decided somehow
that I, the Muslim son
of a broke freedom fighter
who accidentally ventured
into the business of selling dreams,
should become its king of romance,
the “Badhshah of Bollywood,”
the greatest lover
the country has ever seen …
with this face.
Yeah.
(Laughter)
Which has alternately
been described as ugly, unconventional,
and strangely, not chocolatey enough.
(Laughter)
The people of this ancient land
embraced me in their limitless love,
and I’ve learned from these people
that neither power nor poverty
can make your life more magical
or less tortuous.
I’ve learned from the people of my country
that the dignity of a life,
a human being, a culture,
a religion, a country
actually resides in its ability
for grace and compassion.
I’ve learned that whatever moves you,
whatever urges you to create, to build,
whatever keeps you from failing,
whatever helps you survive,
is perhaps the oldest and the simplest
emotion known to mankind,
and that is love.
A mystic poet from my land famously wrote,
(Recites poem in Hindi)
(Poem ends)
Which loosely translates
into that whatever –
yeah, if you know Hindi,
please clap, yeah.
(Applause)
It’s very difficult to remember.
Which loosely translates
into actually saying
that all the books of knowledge
that you might read
and then go ahead
and impart your knowledge
through innovation,
through creativity, through technology,
but mankind will never be
the wiser about its future
unless it is coupled with a sense of love
and compassion for their fellow beings.
The two and a half alphabets
which form the word “प्रेम,”
which means “love,”
if you are able to understand that
and practice it,
that itself is enough
to enlighten mankind.
So I truly believe the future “you”
has to be a you that loves.
Otherwise it will cease to flourish.
It will perish in its own self-absorption.
So you may use your power
to build walls
and keep people outside,
or you may use it to break barriers
and welcome them in.
You may use your faith
to make people afraid
and terrify them into submission,
or you can use it
to give courage to people
so they rise to the greatest
heights of enlightenment.
You can use your energy
to build nuclear bombs
and spread the darkness of destruction,
or you can use it to spread
the joy of light to millions.
You may filthy up the oceans callously
and cut down all the forests.
You can destroy the ecology,
or turn to them with love
and regenerate life
from the waters and trees.
You may land on Mars
and build armed citadels,
or you may look for life-forms and species
to learn from and respect.
And you can use
all the moneys we all have earned
to wage futile wars
and give guns in the hands
of little children
to kill each other with,
or you can use it
to make more food
to fill their stomachs with.
My country has taught me
the capacity for a human being to love
is akin to godliness.
It shines forth in a world
which civilization, I think,
already has tampered too much with.
In the last few days,
the talks here, the wonderful people
coming and showing their talent,
talking about individual achievements,
the innovation, the technology,
the sciences, the knowledge
we are gaining by being here
in the presence of TED Talks
and all of you
are reasons enough
for us to celebrate the future “us.”
But within that celebration
the quest to cultivate
our capacity for love and compassion
has to assert itself,
has to assert itself,
just as equally.
So I believe the future “you”
is an infinite you.
It’s called a chakra
in India, like a circle.
It ends where it begins from
to complete itself.
A you that perceives
time and space differently
understands both
your unimaginable
and fantastic importance
and your complete unimportance
in the larger context of the universe.
A you that returns back
to the original innocence of humanity,
which loves from the purity of heart,
which sees from the eyes of truth,
which dreams from the clarity
of an untampered mind.
The future “you” has to be
like an aging movie star
who has been made to believe
that there is a possibility
of a world which is completely,
wholly, self-obsessively
in love with itself.
A world – really, it has to be a you
to create a world
which is its own best lover.
That I believe, ladies and gentlemen,
should be the future “you.”
Thank you very much.
Shukriya.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)