Yesterday I had written a piece in which I had written about seeing Sonam Kapoor at the airport and how it created a buzz and the fact that she was behaving with poise and receptive towards her fans. One gentleman, a youngster who I will not name wrote below the article on my facebook page “I don’t understand why people give so much of attention to star kids. She became star as she got chance to act in movies as such to which a lot of theatre artist are there who aren’t getting chance, as they don’t have a background else they are much more better than her.”
Don’t all of us get this thought sometimes when we look at people who are more advantaged than us? For example thoughts like “His father has built everything for him/her and he does not have to do anything”, “If he/she were not born in this family then he/she would be rotting”; “They have got too much easy money” etc. However the key is that all of us are advantaged in a way as compared to some other people. For example this gentleman has had a convent school education and is enjoying some luxuries in life due to his being born in a family where his parents could afford to give him a good life. Is this not an advantage over people who are born in extremely poor families and where the parents cannot even afford to educate the kids or people on the streets who find it difficult to make even two ends meet?
The fact is that all of us are privileged in one way or the other. There is always a set of people who are more advantaged than us and those are lesser advantaged. Are we going to be always jealous of those who have got more than us by birth or those who have used their own free will provided by god to do better than what we were born with. There are so many people who have built themselves up, in the global context there are people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, Usain Bolt, Novak Djokovic, many film stars etc who have made it from scratch. In the Indian context promoters of Infosys, someone like Shah Rukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Kapil Dev, Sania Mirza, Dhirubhai Ambani etc were not born rich or into families where they had an advantage. They moved ahead and achieved as they wanted to and were focussed on getting there.
As per Hindu scriptures what you start life with in this life is as a result of your carry forward of Karma of the last several reincarnations. It is your own past actions that are carried forward to this life and you seem to be bound in the restrictions that are placed because of that. However God gives us enough free will to break away from these shackles or restrictions and use our hard work and single minded pursuit of a goal to achieve. By continuously being jealous of what others have and having a feeling that it is too tough as the other person has a head start or advantage is not going to get us anywhere.
We always need to remember that to become No 1 we always have to get past the person who is already No 1. As such the path to the top lies in moving ahead of the current top. Most people tend to lose it in the mind already when they are faced with an opponent who is perceived to be better than them. This holds true in all vocations of life. When in front of a more successful businessman a smaller businessman has an inferiority complex to start with. Similarly in sports when competing against someone higher ranked the opponent needs to believe that he can beat the higher ranked player, if not then the game is already lost in the mind. I have used this psychology in the tennis matches of my daughter where she used to get psyched up if she was playing against a ranked player when she started competing. Once she had a match against the top seed and I told her that this girl is actually lower ranked than you and you will beat her easily. She finally lost the match but competed so well that the 400 rank differences between her and the top ranked girl seemed as if the difference was only of a few ranks. Later on when she got to know who she had played with she was amazed with her game.
Instead of thinking of what others have and how you have been given a raw deal by god it is better to try and achieve by believing that you can do better and better over what you are doing today. All the karma is yours. So yes, Sonam Kapoor is advantaged due to being the daughter of Anil Kapoor. However we have also seen that children of many film stars, businessmen etc do not do well and remain a pale shadow of their parents. They might have all the money but think of their psychology where people always compare them and call them failures. There are two sides of everything, it’s better to look at the brighter side so that the light reflects on you.