Having a Tough Life?

Tell me whose life, among any of the following, was easy-going and not-brimmed-up with unending hurdles?

• Priyanka Chopra

  • Priyanka Chopra may be steering a breaker of worldwide success, but she didn’t get there within a jiffy. Born to two general practitioners in the Indian Army, she spent most of her childhood hopping between cities like most army kids.

• The late Johnny Walker

  • He started his simple life as, Badruddin Khan Jamaluddin Kazi, a bus-conductor in Mumbai before becoming one of India’s most loved comedians – The Great Johnny Walker.

• Shania Twain

  • Twain’s career indeed began more out of necessity than natural ambition. Her parents divorced when she was two. Her mom and stepfather often couldn’t make enough to get by. So Twain started singing in bars at all hours to make extra money when she was just eight years old till she lost her parents at 21 in a car accident. Taking care of her three younger siblings, she grew to become the Great Canadian singer.

• The late Mehmood (Comedian)

  • A commoner who worked odd jobs as a driver and poultry seller before becoming one of India’s most iconic comic actors.

• Steve Jobs,

  • Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, to parents who put him up for adoption at birth with the couple Paul and Clara Jobs, neither of whom had a college education. He worked with his father Paul as a mechanic for the most part of his childhood. He was often suspended from the classes because of misbehaviour. He slept on the floor in friends’ dorm rooms, returned Coke bottles for food money, and got weekly free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. All this eventually led him to become an American entrepreneur and business magnate (co-founder of Apple Inc.)

• Amitabh Bachchan,

  • It is a cabalistic fact that in early life, Amitabh Bachchan, who aspired to become an actor, was spurned for his voice, awkward height and not having a ‘camera fitting face’. History is well versed with the irony because today, Amitabh Bachchan is recognised across India and the world at large for his baritone voice, assertive height and extraordinary face.

• Jim Carrey

  • When Carrey was 14 years old, his father lost his job, and his family hit rough times. They moved into a VW van on a relative’s lawn, and the young aspiring comedian—who was so dedicated to his craft that he mailed his resume to The Carroll Burnett Show just a few years earlier, at age 10—took an eight-hours-per-day factory job after school to help make ends meet. At age 15, Carrey performed his comedy routine onstage for the first time—in a suit, his mom made him—and totally bombed, but he was undeterred. The next year, at 16, he quit school to focus on comedy full time. He moved to LA shortly after, where he would park on Mulholland Drive every night and visualize his success. One of these nights he wrote himself a check for $10,000,000 for “Acting Services Rendered,” which he dated for Thanksgiving 1995. Just before that date, he hit his payday with Dumb and Dumber. He put the deteriorated check, which he’d kept in his wallet the whole time, in his father’s casket.

• Nawazuddin Siddiqui

  • He spent years working as a chemist and a watchman but Nawazuddin proved he is the perfect example of ‘dreams can come true if you never give up’. He is today one of the nation’s finest actors.

• Oprah Winfrey,

  • Oprah’s dealt with a lot throughout her public life—criticism about her weight, racism, intrusive questions about her sexuality, just to name a few—but she never let it get in the way of her ambition and drive. When you look at her childhood, her personal triumphs are cast in an even more remarkable light.
    Growing up, Oprah was reportedly a victim of sexual abuse and was repeatedly molested by her cousin, an uncle, and a family friend. Later, she became pregnant and gave birth to a child at age 14, who passed away just two weeks later. But Oprah persevered, going on to finish high school as an honors student, earning a full scholarship to college, and working her way up through the ranks of television, from a local network anchor in Nashville to an international superstar and creator of her OWN network (we couldn’t help ourselves).

• Narendra Modi,

  • A common man, selling chais(tea) for a living, who was born into a humble family with limited means kept his face up and stared in only one direction – ahead. Today, he is the Indian Prime Minister and one of the most talked about leaders internationally.

• The late Dev Anand

  • Today he’s an evergreen part of Indian Cinema whose name will forever be remembered. But there was a time when he was a simple clerk in the Censor Board Office earning peanuts.

• MS Dhoni

  • A young boy with a dream larger than his reach worked as a railway ticket collector before he became a country’s pride and India’s World Cup-winning captain.

• JK Rowling

  • J.K. Rowling had just gotten a divorce, was on government aid, and could barely afford to feed her baby in 1994, just three years before the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, was published. When she was shopping it out, she was so poor she couldn’t afford a computer or even the cost of photocopying the 90,000-word novel, so she manually typed out each version to send to publishers. It was rejected dozens of times until finally Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, gave it a second chance after the CEO’s eight-year-old daughter fell in love with it.
• And many more unending stories…

Only Who Start Small Dare to Dream Big

In the face of adversity when you curse your destiny or blame your fate, remember that if instead you set your mind in making your dreams come true, there’s nothing that can stop you. No matter how small your beginnings are, you have it within yourself to reach somewhere in life.

~ scoopwhoop.com