How He Inspires Me!!

I had recently published a novel titled ‘Just you, me and a secret’. This has entitled me to answer questions by bloggers, online sites and magazines. One question that appears in every such interview is about who my role model is. Before I answer this question, every time, I google up the meaning of the word “Role-model”.

“A Person looked to by others as an example…” I was fine till I read this and freaked out every time when I read the last three words “To be imitated.” Do I really want to imitate someone? I used to wonder. But along with time and maturity, I understood that imitating doesn’t mean doing the same thing, the same way but adopting a good quality of someone. Before I tell you who my role model is, I would like to introduce myself and how I travel in my road to success.  

I started dreaming of becoming a writer. I started my writing career with my articles to various columns of various newspapers. Whenever an entry was called for, by a newspaper, I used to write to that. The next morning, I used to unusually wake up at 5:30 am and wait for the paper to hit the doorsteps. The look of my name printed in the paper would excite me enough to love writing the rest of my life. Slowly, the rejected articles, that failed to reach the print, were archived in a blog. A blog started to dump the rejections had turned into a huge hit of my life. I started writing short stories, winning contests; in short, I started being noticed. Today, I have two award winning documentaries, at WE CARE international film festival, to my credit as a director; one of my short stories was made into a short film and screened in AVM preview-theater. I was interviewed as a writer, for the first time, for this short movie titled ‘Bhinbam’ by Deccan chronicle. Today, I am a published author. My debut novel, Just, you me and a secret, was published few months ago and I was interviewed by The Hindu and Deccan Chronicle. To me, this is a mile stone in the road to my success. From writing letters to the editors to being interviewed by the newspapers, is a big thing for me. I am not saying I have achieved something great. I am not blowing my own trumpet here, but I am saying how I see myself improve and how I see myself move forward in life. If this is what you call not being modest, go ahead, call it so. My role model has taught me how to feel proud enough about myself and how not to bother about people who talk. Because people always talk! :D Let me tell you how my role model helped me, in a way, to reach this milestone. 

The biggest challenge I had (now I am better at handling it) was time management. I work as a IT Developer and my work schedule is pretty hectic, right from day one of my career. After a tiring day at work, I used to sit with my laptop to write. Sometimes, politics at work might bother me, sometimes people at work, sometime the work itself might bother me enough to not get the right mood to write. One fine day, I found a sound cloud link someone had shared. I listened to it, without any mood to write. It was a sound clip from a radio program. I couldn't stop laughing. I laughed till my tummy hurt. My head was flushed out of the tiredness and the thoughts from work that were stuck to it. My mind became calm and fresh. I began to write. I wrote till 3 am and then went to bed. The short story, I had written that day turned out to be a hit, compared to the rest that I had written that month. I wondered what caused the sudden liking among people for that short story. That one was fresh and had all the energy in it while the others had traces of work pressure and tiredness. From then on, whenever I had no mood to write, I had listened to some or the other audio clipping of that radio jockey and then began to write.

I am sure most of you would have guessed the radio jockey’s name. Yeah! You are right. I am talking about my role model, my dear RJ Balaji.

                Does this alone make him my role model? Not really. This was how he helped me write, helped me flush out the unwanted from my head and kept it clean to think about writing. Okay! Why do I call him my role model then? He is a RJ and he is not the only RJ or he is not pioneer in RJing. We have heard many RJs before. But I have never got addicted to someone show so much. IS that only me? No. Not many have even listened to RJs who talk between the songs, before him we have changed the channels when the songs gets over. But he made us wait, listening to songs we don’t like, to listen to him. What was special with him? He broke the cliché’ of RJing. He did what he did differently. I learnt that we need to break the rules and the cliché. We need to do things our way and not the way defined.

                Was that the only quality I learnt? Again, no. It’s from him I learnt to be fearless. Challenging big shots doesn’t require you to be a big shot. He is an example of this. He is no one from cinema. He calls himself a common man and criticizes movies just like a common man would do. If I were him, I would have feared questions asking who I was in the cinema industry or what knowledge I possessed to criticize the big shots, who have already achieved. But he had that self-confidence and took the challenge of facing it all. Neither did he flavor his reviews with favoritism nor did the fear show up in the reviews. He, not bothering about anyone, reviewed movies even of the top directors of Tamil Cinema. I learnt to kill my complex of asking myself ‘Who I am to do this?’ and build self confidence in doing what my heart says is right.

                He revolutionized the radio world. Can you believe that a RJ from down south of India, who speaks in a regional language that just one state speaks has 115 k likes for his page in FB? Only after seeing him, many youngsters considered RJing as a career option.

FB Page for RJ Balaji

A few people lay the road to success for us.

A few people teach us how to lay our own roads to success.
But RJ Balaji, my role model, taught me to question myself why there is a need for a road to reach                 success.

I wrote a book and he is my biggest inspiration to do things differently. So I had a dream of giving the first selling copy of my book to him. I wrote a mail to him asking for an appointment and he immediately agreed to fulfill my dream. I met him, spoke to him and understand how humble he is. I couldn’t and didn’t want to click a selfie with him due to the fear of losing the photo quality to the front camera. So I had clicked a proper photograph with him. I have told him that one day I will write his biography, if he agrees. 

Another story about him-->Want to become a Lorry drive!!

I am writing about #MyRoleModel as a part of the activity by Gillette India in association with BlogAdda.com.


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