Shah Rukh Khan's Speech At Yale University (2012) [texts]

Photo: Yale University

Actor Shah Rukh Khan visited Yale as a guest of the Chubb Fellowship on April 12, 2012. The Chubb Fellowship is one of Yale's most distinguished honors, bringing leaders to campus to encourage students interested in public service and the public good.

Shah Rukh Khan, is an Indian actor, film producer, and television personality, he's also known by the initialism SRK. Referred to in the media as the "Badshah of Bollywood", "King of Bollywood" and "King Khan", he has appeared in more than 80 Bollywood films, and earned numerous accolades, including 14 Filmfare Awards. Wikipedia

This is the full speech by sharukh khan at Yale University:

"First of all let me just thank the faculty and students of the Yale university, fellows of  ' ' ' ' ' ' white collage and the chof fellowship and master Jeffery Brenzel for being so kind thank you!
Yale office of international affairs and the Yale south Asian society and of course Isha for dealing following up with the most disorganized and in-communicative person in the world, which is me, to fix today's meeting with you all i'm really really happy very humbled very honored and thank you for having me over here.

And, no i'm being honest here. Ah! and it was very cold, it was i think fifth or sixth of December, it was snowing here, and i remember i was doing a song from Kabhi Albida Na Kehna in the middle (audience cheering) and i was i was trying to kiss Rani Mukherji while mouthing the words, we do that in Bollywood for all the guys who don't know how it is. Yeah, we sing songs and we try to kiss girls at the same time. (audience laughing) And i i i'm being honest my mouth froze in the middle of  "Kabhi Albida Naaaaa..." yeah i i i had a locked jaw, yeah so, i'm hoping my second outing to Yale is a little better because otherwise it just won't sound right if i was to stuck on, i don;t know what you guys call yourself, Yaletieds, Yalers, Ytt..?(audience Yalie) Ya Yeah, that, i i i hope i don't get stuck at Yahhhhhhh.. and go beyond that, eh?

So i was told not to dwell too much on my movies when i spoke to you, i'm  to give you an inspirational talk, tell you stuff you can think about when you leave this room. That worries me, gives me performance anxiety, about fifteen hundreds of you here hoping to hear words of wisdom from sexy, desirable man, (audience cheering) who couldn't kiss a girl last time he was in Yale because it was too cold.(audience laughing) But i am, i wnn i wnn i wanna tell you right in the beginning, i'm not that guy. I'm telling you, i mean i'm sexy and desirable, but i'm (audience cheering) but i'm not about to leave you any more inspired then you were when you walked in here. And i read this lame joke on google, yes i go to google and search everything there, even my next script i'm searching on google now. (audience laughing)

And the joke was like this, a dying man gasping for breadth, desperately gestured to the priest by his side for a piece of paper. With great effort, he then wrote a few word on it, handed to the priest, and passed away. The priest kept the paper in his pocket and forgot all about it until the final service. Here, he suddenly recalled the dead man's last scribble. Unfolding the paper, he told the funeral congregation that he was about to read great words of inspiration from the dying man. He opened the paper, the piece of paper had these words on it, "you are standing on my oxygen tube you fool". (audience laughing)
So i'm gonna be kinda be like that priest. Don't expect words of wisdom from me. I'm just gonna tell my life's journey in a very simple words, and which may not leave you inspired, but will help you survive this life. And if you can do that kids, if you can survive, happiness, creativity and success will follow on its own. Only i hope my words will give you enough insight when you hear the story that i have to tell you, that you can tell the world, world move over, you are standing on my oxygen tube, i need to breadth, yeah.

So journeys can be defined by age and time or even by destinations as most often they are, but i feel it's hard for me to tell you the story of my life in those terms because the concept of time has always eluded me. The day my father died seemed longer than my entire childhood. The day i felt my first success seemed fleetingly hour long, not long enough perhaps. I wonder where it went. Even the cycle of time confounds me. I worked at night, i worked the dark until the sunrise on most days and fall asleep as the world awakens to light. My friends call me an owl. I like to think of myself as bat, Batman the prince of darkness. (audience cheering) Some of you would know, i have a superhero fetish, yeah, so i keep bringing this back. Age is not my forte either. I still cannot fix my own, am i 45 or 15? If i could, would i be romancing girls, one third my age would normally would call me uncle.

I had so much fun collecting the action figures of my last film Ra. One, that, (audience cheering) that none of the critical reviews  tanking my film affected me at all.(audience- Booo! yeah boo!) And as for my destination, i don't think i ever knew one. I walk, i ran in the direction of my dreams, things change along the way, people change, i change, the world changes and even my dream change. I don't have a place to arrive, i just keep doing what i know how to do the best that i can do it. I'll probably ended up diluted, geriatric in a wheel chair wearing a cape and tights imagining my own flight out of this world, but of course with a young girl in my arms. (audience laughing)

So i will tell you the story of me, but i will tell it my own way. In the language of my perceptions, in the things i think matter beyond fame, success and the dying of my gray hair. I have understood the measure of my life lies in the expanse of my hearts experience, and nothing else matters. If you take anything out of it, good. Otherwise i've been told by the master, i can put on music and dance for you on Chammak Challo. (audience cheering)

Okey, first of all, yeah we do that later, i know i know, people call me to these serious places, and say oh, fuck everything, just do the dance and go back home. But i insist you listen to me okey?(audience laughing) I wanna tell you, i have to tell you that i learned a few big words because i was coming to Yale. ( audience laughing) On google, of course. And i (laughs), so the first one that i'm gonna tell you about, so there are three things i wanna tell you about this evening. The first one is i'm gonna tell you to be a funambulist. Now, yeah, that's a big word, yeah, impressed? Okay, so that means a tight rope walker. Because a lot of you people, actually all of you, are somehow the, are going to create things in your life. So a funambulist is a tight rope walker. The first one i learned, please give me claps for this new word that i have taught Yale. (audience applauding)

However i look at it in this eventual analysis, my life has centered around my creativity. I have assimilated the world through creative expression, and in return the world has experienced me hopefully. I've grown to understand that on one hand, the world will always uphold creativity as the most honest feeling possible. On the other hand, the potence  of fame, the glitz, the glamour, the wealth arise from this very recognition of creativity will always be questioned. Why do we do that? Because sometimes, it allows us to feel better than the creator, and sometimes, it fills a void within us, that comes about us by being in awe of his or her creation. Either way, it enables us to quantify his or her engagement, engagement with the world around him. I'm an actor. My life is testament to this duality.  George Burns said that acting is all about honesty, if you can fake that you've got it made. And he couldn't have defined it better. Honest and fake, yes that's what i feel as a creative person all the time. Let me tell you my schizophrenia, creative expression comes from the deepest experience of the artiest himself.  a good artiest cannot be separated from his creation. Good art is honest art. A man may be an artiest, a writer, a sculptor, an actor, or a totem pole cover. Whatever he is, if what he creates is true to himself, it becomes a vivid testimonial to human creativity. If it lacks honesty, it is entire, its entire premise is a waste.

At the same time and quite paradoxically a man becomes distinct from his creation from the moment it is placed in the public domain. It no longer belongs to him. So it comes from your gut, and it is put out there for others to accept it or throw it in the gutter. Many a nights, i have gone back home after receiving an award, pumped up and all happy, and just to read on the internet that what i really deserved was the golden banana for the worst actor of the year award. (audience- boo!) Yeah it's called Kela award or some shit like that. (audience laughing) And i, i become heartbroken, angry, and completely convinced that- bananas and critics  both should have their skins peeled and fed to the monkeys. (audience cheering) I momentarily lose my ability to give and close up. And here's where the trick is:- when you are in this place of despair, when you walk out of this collage, this university and walk the path of life where the world is tearing you down into yourself, there's only one thing you can do survive, Hang on to who you are inside. The world would be unkind to you, it will not be able to see you, you must learn at such times to be able to see yourself.

Life as a creative person is like walking on a tight rope, i have to balancing, i have to keep balance, i began to lose myself in my own melodrama. It is frustrating that i find myself living up-to other peoples interpretation of what i ought to be. And when faced with densest or unappreciation, i start losing my love affair with my own audience. It becomes a tight balance act to keep doing what i do best and not to be bothered by the reactions of the people i do it for in the first place. I danced harder, i (mumbles) longer and i pivoted on my road , stretched-out beneath my feat, and i try not to slip. I can slide but never fall. And all this while, i have to keep a smile on my face and keep signing autographs and taking pictures. And why do i do this? Because i'm a funambulist, trying to balance my action, and exceed reaction to my naked show of who i am inside.

Yet i'm playing this real life illusion out, more often than not, my honest self is sitting in the audience applauding my performance, while laughing heartily at my own stupidity. My little kids and friends here learn to love at yourself to. Never become cynical about yourself or your life. becoming cynical about your life is the single most destructive thing you can do. For you have to remember, creativity is your gift to the world, it was never meant to be butter for anything, not even appreciation. You have to dig deep. I do it , i don't know if i'm supposed to say this, i do it while drinking vodka and listening to really Soddy songs. (audience laughing) But you guys have to find less destructive ways to do this. At least till you become my age.

But you have to believe that you create only because this is the biggest gift you have to give to your world. And, maybe that's why we even call god a creator. It's not about the cars and houses, it never was. These are peripherals. They never come about because of your talent or your creative outpourings they come out of a business that people around you do. Those peoples are in the business of barter, not you. Yours is the business of giving and learning. Your work of art may never be complete in your lifetime. Your fulfillment will always lie in your creative expression, not in its product. So look beyond the brick beds, the critics, and know within you, that you always have a choice between barter and creation. Life as a creator will always be a tight rope. So do not try to feed your stomach with creativity. It is food for the soul not your stomach. Do not be afraid to defy conventions, do not be afraid to destroy systems that kill art and your souls, do not be afraid to be hungry, and do not afraid to walk alone if necessary. Because on a tight rope we all walk alone.   And remember if you are a creator you are a funambulist. And not very many people know what it means let alone be it, so be a funambulist as my prayer to all you creative people here at Yale tonight. (audience applauding)

The second thing i wanna tell you, and i'll go over it fast before you get too bored, is love your punching bags. Just as my life is centered around creativity, like every fellow human beings, it is also centered around the wish to happiness. Your age is the age when we most confuse happiness with gratification, so i'll quite plainly tell you. If you are smart, if you want to survive life, relentless onslaught of challenges, you will sooner or later understand that the things that makes you happy ten years ago will end up being the ones that make you happy when you hit the geriatrics of age stage also. It's a good start collecting your action figure heroes now. I have everything i have aspired for at your age. I have success, i have fame, i have wealth, and i have three play-stations.(audience laughing) I do, i have one for the house, one for the shootings, and one just in case, because i can have one more. (audience laughing)

But none of these, but none of these have any consequence to my happiness. The only thing that does it is the love of my children. You don't have children. (audience laughing) I hope. (laughs) Not yet, and if you have don't tell the master. But you have parents, and you have peoples you love. And nothing in this world of every things means more than that, happiness, in other word, lies in the things you will never be able to count. To me it is no more than cuddling to my kids and watching iCarly or the family guy. (audience cheering) I think family guy is very cool. And i think iCarly is very sweet. Most of the time i do that. The other day, my son and i stumbled upon Kama sutra on the net. And i can tell you that experience was not very happy. He's 14 and he knew more about the poses then i did. That's not fair.

I want you to understand this business of happiness well because i know at one level, all parents are actually the same. Some look stunner, some are less fun, some embarrassingly wired, but for each parent, the bottom and the top line of their lives is this, you kids are the greatest source of  happiness. Parents want nothing in return, just that you respect that feeling, that's all.

I'd like to narrate an incident of my own children. First of all, let me be very clear, I do believe girls are from the planet Venus. My girl comes from a place of gentleness, caring, love, intelligent, and all things beautiful. My boy comes from, i'm too good to be your son planet (audience laughing). And i know, i know, this may make me very unpopular but i wanted to say this while i was flying here, that if one thing that you take away from this lecture tonight, i want everyone to know, boys are obnoxious. (audience cheering) They are philandering, lying, cheating, super zealous, sneering, snobs. (audience cheering) Girls are good. (speaks hindi- ladkiyon ko pataane ke liye ye sab karna padta hai) But i believe that, i like girls. I think girls are much better.

I was in London shooting and missing my kids, and i'll give you an incident. Being from the boring school of people who send writings to their kids in the hope of making them better human beings, i send my daughter this verse from a poem by E.E. Cummings, and you guys should read the poem, it's fantastic. And this poem is for all the girls here. I want to read this out. "I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens, only something in me understands, The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses, nobody, not even the rain has such small hands". And this for all you girls, and the only smaller hands is a guess this little kid who is crying there. (audience laughing) (laughs) I send this message to my daughter and i instantly receive this text message in return, "I love it, papa, it is beautiful, i'm going to write it in my secret diary with the secret lock and keep it in my secret hiding place under the Katy Perry and Lady Gaga poster. I love you and i miss you. I'm too excited watching hunger games tonight". (audience cheering) (audience laughing)

And (laughs) feeling bad, feeling bad that i hadn't texted something meaningful to my darling son, i sent him something i had read too. "How are you my son, i wrote, i missed you. Do you know a boy is someone that a mother loves the most? little girls hate him. He is true to a dirt on his(or its) face, beauty with the cut on his finger. Wisdom would smell in his hair, and hope of the future with a frog in his pocket. I love you". He replied back with one letter of the alphabet. (audience silence, audience K!) Nah, it's actually it's very close to you. It had a but in front, and says but, and he had Y of the Yale, why. (audience laughing) I mean like, why are you sending such boring messages? And of course there was an emoticon, one of those squiggly little things which i can't make out what they are expressing. I wanted to fly to Mumbai and hang him upside down till he look like a silly face emoticon himself. But i didn't, i just smiled, and both replies made me feel love for my kids. Whatever they do as long as they're happy, it makes me happy. I speak to you guys, a parent of two very wired kids, whatever you do, whichever mistake you make, however you react to them, your parents are your best friends. They might be boring, silly or stern at times, maybe some of you are embarrassed of yours, i know my kids are of me, but if ever, any of you are in trouble, of any kind, the best friends you can always trust to watch your backs are your parents. They will always come good. 

I lost my parents very early in my life, and i miss them dearly, so all of you, who still have yours, don't listen to them, fool them if you must, a bit of lying is also welcomed, (audience laughing) but make sure you cherish what you have because when you don't have them like me, you really miss someone to be rude to, someone to you can, someone you can take for granted. Someone to send whatever you wish with. You miss the comfort of being loved unconditionally. I call parents unconditional and forgiving punching bags who feel happier when they get bashed up by the kids. If you want to survive life. It's best to began to respect the gift of love right now. As children Your first teachers of this acceptance are your parents. If you are unable to accept the love they give you in whatever form it arises, even it's in the form of a tight slap across your faces, then when you became a parent, you will end up having to learn this lesson somewhat more harshly from teachers you give birth to. Those are your kids.

And learning kama sutra from my son is not a good idea, you would agree. (audience laughing) Incidentally he studies in the school that Isha's mom runs in India. I have to say ma'm, your syllabus is quite different from the one that i used to study when i was fourteen. (audience laughing and applauding) She's insisting that she will get kama sutra in Yale also very soon.

And the last bit, a fiendish friend called failure.Whether i like it or not, my life has also been constant play with what the world calls success. Success is a wonderful thing, but it tends not to be the sort of experience that we learn from. We enjoy it perhaps we even deserve it, but we don't acquire wisdom from it. And maybe that's why it cannot be passed on either. Me being successful does not mean my kids are going to be successful. Even if i teach them everything that i know and how to do it. So i feel that talking about success is completely a big waste of time.

Instead let me tell you honestly, whatever happened to me happened because i have always been terrified of failure. I don't want as much as i want to succeed as much as i don't want to fail. I came from a very normal lower middle class family. I saw a lot of failure. My father was a beautiful man and the most successful failure in the world. My mother also failed to stay long enough with me to see me become a big movie star. We were quite poor actually, and let me tell you, poverty is not an ennobling experience at all. Poverty, and tears, fear, and stress, and sometimes depression i watched my parents go through this several times. At an early age after my parents died, i equated poverty with failure. I just don't want to be poor. So when i got chance to act in films, it wasn't out of any creative desire, i say this honestly. It was purely out of the fear of failure and poverty. Most of the films i signed were discards of better known actors and the producers could not find anyone else to do them. I did them all to make sure that i was working to avoid unemployment. The timing was something right, i worked very hard, there were other people around it, and i became a big star, the films became big hits. Which means sometimes, a success is not the direct results of actions, and let nobody tell you that. Success sometimes just happens, really. It is accidental and we have to take credit for it. I do it sometimes surely out of embarrassment.

So i believe the true path to success is through the fear of failure. If you aren't scared enough of failing , you're unlikely to succeed. It's not pleasant to fail at stuff. All of us experienced it. You will too if you haven't already. So use it succeed. How i have done is, a few points i would like to say and then i'll end this monologue, firstly it's not the absence of  failure that make you success that makes success. It is your response to failure that actually helps to buffer the reverses that you experienced. I personally have one response to failure, pragmatism. A recognition and believe that if one approach does not work, then the other will or might. Failure also give me an incentive to greater exertion, hard work, which invariably leads to a later success in most cases. Repeated failure has taught me to stop pretending i'm someone else. It's given me the clarity to stick to things that really matter to me instead distracting me from my core. Failure also get you to find who your real friends are. The true strength of your relationships only get tested in the face of strong adversity. Overcoming some of my failures has made me discover that i have a strong will and discipline then i suspected. It has helped me to have confidence in my ability to survive.

Failure is an amazing teacher. There's a well know story of this very successful man and a reporter asked him, sir, how was it that you always succeed, then he said, right decisions. And he said, how do you make right decisions? And he says, you know experience. Yes, yes, how do you get so experienced? It's wrong decisions and failure.(audience laughing) So do fail, and it's alright to fail.

You have to know and learn that life is not just a checklist of acquisitions, attainments, and fulfillments. Your qualifications and CVs don't really matter. Instead life is difficult and complicated. And beyond anyone's control. The humility to know it will help you survive its vicissitudes. This is the second big word that i have learned. (audience cheering and applauding) But i don't want to sound dark. My hope for all of you is that you retain a lifelong love of learning, that you never cease to dream exciting and inspiring dreams, and when you fail, you don't, and you fail, you fail well enough to succeed next time. Don't be afraid of being afraid. Be afraid of not facing your fears and failures.

As i was coming here and this is my dream, i was telling the press outside when i walked in here, i sent a message to daughter who's 11 and a half, my son 14 and i said it's one of the most beautiful institutions I've ever seen in my life. Genuinely,  you guys are fortunate to be studying here. (audience applauding) And i really wish my kids are good enough, like you all you young boys and girls and all the parents who've helped them to do this, are good enough to reach here and study and get this opportunity.

 So, i wrote to  my daughter and said "so pretty and nice and beautiful, i wish you could come and study here, and she sent me back a long message as she always does. Is it pretty, papa? Is it nice? Is it snowing there?" Because i told her last time i was here it was snowing. And my son sent me one alphabet. K (audience laughing) Which i have understood when you extend means OK. And for some reason he's also written, papa, Chuck Norris has trained his dog to pick up his own poo. (audience laughing) Because Chock Norris will not take shit from anyone. (audience laughing and applauding) Remember all boys and girls, that you're fortunate enough to be funambulists, you have an amazing set of punching bags, your parents cherish them always, and failure is your fiendish friend keep him close. And as my son sent a message don't take not shit from anybody. (audience cheering) God bless you. Thank you very much (audience applauding) Thank you, you're all very kind, and i wish you all the best in life. Thank you very much. Thank you."