Success is so overrated: Kangana to open up about 10 years of rejection in new book
Before Kangana Ranaut became a household name, she endured 10 years of "humiliation, rejection, embarrassment". The Bollywood actress wants to write about her experience of struggle in a book.
Ranaut announced her intention to do so at the launch of Barkha Dutt's The Unquiet India, reports Indian Express. She said, “The way I dealt with my failures has been very heavy and I would like to write a book about that, how success will never teach you anything.”
Instead, the actress says she is a big believer in the value of struggle:
“So I’ve been through struggle for 10 years, and I think that’s what shaped me as a person today. I don’t know how much a success people see me as – that is a very external aspect of one’s growth – but I think I’m a very successful person on a very personal level. And when you lose something or face failure, it’s about how you deal with it and not lose your self-respect and self-worth,” she said.
“Ten years of humiliation, rejection, embarrassment could’ve made me believe what the whole world thought about me – like if they thought about me as a loser, but I didn’t think of myself as that or as what the world or my parents thought of me. That’s why I could do what I did in my life… Not just in India but all over the world, winning and success in so overrated,” she added.
Ranaut pointed out that the culture of "standing first in class" has fostered certain our attitudes towards failing:
“We need to tell our children that it is okay to fail, there’s nothing wrong in it. Nothing lasts forever. That kind of spirit needs to be there,” she said.
An inability to accept failure has larger social implications than we think, she said:
“So rejection is so hard to deal with for anyone, especially men, there’s no acceptance for the fact that this women doesn’t want or that she doesn’t have feelings for me. Usually that is the intention and I feel that for 90 per cent of the violence against women – that kind of rejection triggers it.”