So, first of all, thank you very much for having me here at the Inspire Series.
It’s worked dramatically, I’m already inspired to be addressing this really August
intellectual gathering of people from Harvard, a place that my mother thought I will never
reach.
But you know what, lot of people have spoken before me and eloquently and described their
dreams for India and given figures and facts that either are skeptical and like, Mr. Omar
says, aspirational.
But I’m just an actor and I’m going to just give you my dream shamelessly, because
that’s the thing that I can do best.
And by that, I mean when we talk of dreams we have one of our greatest scientists and
philanthropists Dr. Abdul Kalam, and he said something which is very interesting.
He said, “Dreams are not what you have when you sleep.
The true dreams are the ones that don’t let you sleep”.
He said, “When you have that dream once it’s a dream; when you have it twice it
becomes a desire.
And when you see it for the third time consecutively, it becomes a passion, an aim and a goal”,
and that is the passion with which I want to see this fantasy that I have for India
2030.
And Abraham Lincoln also was a dreamer and you know, but he said one thing that makes
most sense in trying to achieve this goal that I have dreamed for my nation.
He said, “If I have six hours to cut down a tree, then I would spend the first four
hours sharpening the axe.”
There’s a great philosophy in that.
In this era of instant gratification we just keep thinking we can achieve all these goals
by just tweaking this, tweaking that, it’s not true.
I really believe that a missionary zeal is required to make that quantum change, that
can make 2030 of what I’m dreaming about right now.
And just let’s look at India as a country, what a unique nation!
Seriously.
Thousands of years old of culture and tradition, many many invasions, being ruled for many
years and we still somehow managed to maintain our identity.
We still somehow have managed to maintain our Indian-ness — our beliefs, our faith
and you know, yeah, there has been — we have our drawbacks — there is corruption,
there is violence, there is differences between the different religions and sects and caste
and everything.
But I can’t help but think looking at India at the geography that we’re not doing really
that bad.
Look at all the other nations around in the world.
Look at our neighbors, compared to that there is somebody in India who’s doing something
right for us to be called a growing economy and being projected as the third largest economy
in 2026 and the most educated and young nation in the world, it’s still functional democracy.
So let’s first accept the fact that there is somebody, some people in India with the
right ideas and the ability to lead the nation to where we are today.
Under that assumption — under that assumption we are also very capable of finding very unique
solutions to the problems that generally the world faces.
And one of them, of course, is the fact that we found freedom through non-violence and
non-cooperation; who would’ve thought that was possible?
We have some other – no, seriously I mean it was as radical of thought then as it is
today, and one man in a loincloth would believe in faith and complete conviction was able
to do that for us — you know, Mahatma Gandhi, and it’s an amazing country of people like
Mahavir, Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi and then Bhagat Singh who also had a dream.
He dreamed then 85 years ago, that I dream of an India where no infant cries for the
want of milk, no youngster is deprived of relevant education, and no youth goes door
to door finding a job.
Sadly, it’s still a dream today.
And I dream of a 2030 when this dream becomes irrelevant.
I dream of a 2030 when everybody is so equally satisfied with what they’re doing, that
they’re able to actually devote about more time back to art and culture which is another
great important aspect of our country.
Now we need to be – for that to happen we need to be a healthy nation.
And when I say healthy, I remember preparing for a film of mine which was released recently
where I had to look like a boxer and I had this biceps and triceps that had to be there.
So I decided just to work on the parts that is seen outside my clothes.
So I was just working out of my biceps and my triceps and my shoulders but you know what
I suddenly realized, the strengths that I had in my arms and biceps was not actually
enough for me to look even fit because it is disproportionate growth.
It is the kind of growth that will not make you fit or strong but actually make you look
inadequate.
And that is what is happening to India today.
Everybody says we are the largest economy — we’re going to be the most populated
country in the years to come and you know with economic superpower and supremacy in
rocket and space technology which I am privy to and then the IT giants and smarter cities.
But ladies and gentlemen, I really believe that more than smarter cities we require smart
villages.
And this is going to be primarily what I talk about today.
You know, a nation is only as strong as its weakest link and rural India is our weakest
link.
See, it’s important that growth and progress goes hand-in-hand with villages also getting
onto the same train towards economic freedom, super-powerdom, all terms that has been coined
for a successful country but that is not happening, the reason being we’re beginning to ignore
them, we’re beginning to actually believe that —
This is a very interesting line that I have found, where they say that everybody believes
that they know what is required for getting the underprivileged and the poor up to speed
with the rest of the country.
OK, and we always start assuming that this is what they want; this is how we can help
the poor and the villages and this is what they need.
And we can’t be more wrong, because when you assume, and as the spelling goes you make
an ass of you and me, let me tell you how that happened to a friend of mine.
His name was — he’s a very profound doctor, a gastroenterologist, and he got a call from
his patient Mr. Abdul, who said, “Doctor Saab, my wife is really really ill and she’s
got a big stomach ache and she can’t sit and she can’t sleep and she’s in big pain,
can I come and visit you?”
And he said, ‘Yes, by all means’.
And like all patients today he’s done his research, he’s gone into the internet and
he said, “usko yeh ho sakta hain, wo sakta hain, and the doctor said, ‘Don’t worry
let me handle it’.
And he checked her out and he said “She has an infected appendix, so I have to do
a surgery and she’ll be fine.”
The surgery was done, she was fine and Abdul was a happy man.
One year later, he calls back to doctor and says, “Sir, my wife has got a stomach ache,
please do the appendix operation, she’ll be fine.”
And so doctor said — the doctor Manu said, “Listen, I am the doctor, let me diagnose,
Abdul, please bring her to the clinic and we’ll fix it up.”
But he said, ‘No, no, sir fix up that operation date, we’ll do it in half an hour and we’ll
be back — just she needs that appendix removed’.
So now he’s losing his patience, he says “Let me do the diagnosis, Abdul, bring her
to the clinic.”
And he’s still insisting and finally the doctor lost it, and he said, “Listen, I
am the doctor and let me tell you that every human being has only one appendix, and I have
already taken out the appendix.
So please don’t tell me how to do my job.”
Abdul waited very patiently for the doctor to finish with his assumptions and then he
shot back very meekly, he says, “Sir, I agree with you, every human being can have
one appendix but a man can have two wives, right?”
So when we start assuming what the rural India needs, we do what I think is most dangerous.
In my vast experiences of shooting in really rural India’s, and villages and small [cook-gramins]
like they call it in Tamil, really small places, I realized shockingly that the biggest financial
burden for a person of this particular village, would you all be able to guess what his biggest
financial burden is — five minutes!
Hey so I’m going to speak for 20 today, I am going to reduce the number of questions,
I’m prepared, is that OK?
OK, so can you all tell me, anybody, quick answers — anybody know which is the biggest
financial burden for a man in one of these small villages?
Sorry, tap, health, OK.
Not health, not the marriage of a daughter, not education, not – liquor, thank you for
reminding me, no.
Say it again, dowry, no, no, no, no.
Let me put you out of your misery.
I’m saying why does he need financial assistance for — the answer is the untimely death of
one relative of a senior in their family, that is the one occasion he can’t prepare
for, that is one occasion where the ceremony demands that he spend a certain amount of
money, feed a certain amount of people, use the funeral expenditures and that’s where
he takes the loan and that’s where he gets indebted and that’s where, to escape that
particular embarrassment and humility of not having the ability to perform the function
every year as a specter of the Indian tradition that he decides to leave the village, because
he’s made to feel inadequate.
Lord Macaulay in 1735 had spoken in the British Parliament and said, “The only way to rule
India is to make the men there feel inadequate”, he said and truly so, that unless he feels
that what he has is lesser than what others have, you will not be able to rule him.
And within a very short period they proved themselves right.
The rural India today is feeling inadequate, they are feeling like they’re not even part
of our country.
And what happens with that is they start then looking at opportunities in villages and saying
better education, better health, better lifestyle and no humility for not having performed the
funeral properly, they decide to give up who they are and move to the cities.
And who they are is what is more important for us to understand.
Who they are, are actually the timekeepers and the bookkeepers of our deep-rooted traditional
culture and stories.
You know, you should see how tradition and culture flourishes in a happy village in India.
We don’t have psychiatrist as a big fashion thing in India and they still manage to maintain
a great level of sanity.
You know, there’s a great phrase from the poem, ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling where it
says, ‘Dream but not make dreams your master; think but not make thoughts your aim; meet
with triumph and disaster and treat those two Impostors just the same.’
It’s very easy to say it but how do you treat those two Impostors just the same?
The answer lies in the tradition and the culture and the books and the epics that are so prominent
and predominant in our country – The Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, the interpretation of that
in the subcontinent, the Bible, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Granny stories, and you know how
to handle the diversities and the setbacks and you’re able to sit back, assemble — reassemble
yourself, come back and fight with the same glory again.
And we don’t give him — when you don’t give a villager that, you’re depriving him,
we’re depriving ourselves of what I think is one of the most important survival tools
in today’s world, which is the culture and tradition.
So I dream of a 2030 where rural India is as developed as the rest of the world, is
as aspirational as the rest of India and where the villager is providedg with the same opportunities
as it is available in the cities.
And after a hard day’s work, a villager is actually able to come back, sit down, have
a drink, put his feet up and start thinking about art and culture and poetry.
That would be a dream that I have for 2030 — a practical dream that I have for 2030.
And the dreams that your parents and my parents had when we were in college — urban middle
class – where everything revolved around the boy, studying hard, getting into a technical
college of a repute and then getting into a reputed managements college and finally
the green card.
And if it was the girl, then it was a spouse with a green card.
I dream of a 2030 where students the world over will dream of a blue card, will dream
of having once actually come to India and study and imbibe the knowledge that we have
as a nation.
It used to be true: we were the first university in the world – Nalanda was the university
where people came in from far and wide.
So it’s not a pipe dream, it’s a practical dream that I have, and I think that’s easily,
easily attainable.
And finally, before I wind up, I think, I’ll dream of a 2030 where we have a meritocratic
electoral base which selects its leaders and whose leaders believe that it is more important
to serve — with a missionary zeal to serve the nation rather than rule it.
You know, there is another stanza from the same poem which says that, if they have the
ability to talk to the crowds yet keep your virtue, walk with Kings – nor lose the common
touch, if neither good friends nor foes can hurt you, yet all men count with you but none
too much — if only the politicians understood the gist of that line, we would have a progressive
country by 2030 where we’ll all be proud of not just the way the country is running
but also proud about our politicians.
And finally, you know, I’m an actor and the dream that I have for myself is that in
2030 I’m as relevant and as handsome hopefully but if age was to catch up, then they probably
would have mapped my face by then and use technology to make me look as young or old,
as the role desired me to look, and I’m still able to romance the pretty young things
that would be part of the industry in 2030.
I see that’s got many guys going ham.
And finally as an actor, I’m used and prone to dialogues, I love to speak dialogues, and
I recently found a line that blew me apart and I thought it was a phenomenal Hindi film
dialogue, where this great gentleman has said, “That whatever I am today and all the achievements
that have been – that has been possible by me and what will eventually also be possible
by me in the near future are all because of my angel mother.”
Do you know who said that?
You know who said that?
Shockingly Abraham Lincoln!
So I dream of a 2030 where every Indian says the exact same thing about his mother and
not just about his mother but also about his motherland – and also for the sake of posterity
about his mother-in-law.
But hey, ladies and gentlemen, what do I know?
I am an actor.
Thank you very much for your patient hearing.