October 11 this year marks the 72nd birthday of one of the most legendary stars of Bollywood, Amitabh Bachchan. On his birth anniversary, as one revisits the celebrity's biography, there emerges the strong role that his stay in Nainital's Sherwood College played in his life. "The school that influenced me most was Sherwood College in Nainital. If I had to talk about Sherwood I would write a book on it! Those three years were by far the happiest times of my life. What I am now is largely because of Sherwood. It taught me to be independent, fearless, loyal and truthful. It taught me values and these, I think, have stayed with me through life," wrote Bachchan in a memoir on his alma mater.
His defining characteristics also developed during his years in Nainital, he chronicled. "The spirit to face life in whatever circumstances came, I think, from the boarding discipline at Sherwood. In fact, it's things we picked up at boarding school that I am using even today. Boarding - school taught me self-sufficiency, independence and how to fend for myself. Even the more refined details like how to dress, how to conduct oneself, how to treat a lady were all a part and parcel of public school grooming."
But hostel life was not without the teething problems for the actor. "I used to be very good at studies earlier, till the sixth standard, when I'd be among the Sherwood, I suddenly found the going tough. May be because the standards were higher. It was a difficult phase. I tried to make up by excelling in sports. I was good at athletics - 100, 200, 400 metres and broad jump. The first time I went into the boxing ring, I won a cup."
One of the most influential moments of his life came when Amitabh was in his second year at Sherwood. According to film researcher and documentary film producer, Manoj Panjani, Amitabh after having won the school's best actor award the previous year was agog to create history by becoming the only student to win the honour twice in a row. But at the last moment he fell ill and could not perform. This was the time his father came to meet him and said to him words that became his credo. Narrating this episode, Amitabh has written," It was the month of June and the school was celebrating its Founder's Week. Parents of the children came from all over to join the festivity. The previous year I had won the Kendal Cup for the best actor's award. I was hoping to win the same award this year. In fact, everyone was quite sure that I would most certainly do. No one student had ever won this award for two consecutive years.
The play, an Agatha Christie, was titled "And Then There Were None and I played the role of a judge. In the afternoon, after our dress rehearsal I suddenly started feeling dizzy. The doctor examining me said I had measles and confined me to a separate room. I was heart-broken! Here, I had worked all these months, and now I couldn't do the play. I felt miserable. I didn't know what to tell my parents who were coming all the way from Delhi, especially to see me perform and now it was all so futile. Not only that, I would have to sit in this lonely room, all by myself, and suffer it since nobody was allowed near me."
That evening as he looked down despondently at the bustling auditorium from the window of the hilltop hospital, his father walked up to him and sat beside him for the next two hours.
"That day my father gave me the greatest lessons of my life. Something I have always cherished and which has stood by me in crisis. He said: Jeevan mein, apne man ka ho to achcha hai, apne man ka na ho to zyada achha. If what is happening is something you like, fine. If not you must not worry for it is not in your control. It is in the control of the Almighty, and the Almighty will never do anything that is said to be wrong for you. He backed up what he said with various incidents and examples, and though at that time I was too depressed, too full of my pain to understand it completely, later when the sorrow subsided I saw the wisdom of his words, the enormity of his message. Values inculcated in my childhood, that's what I want to pass on to my children. They are, after all, the new generation and the optimism must continue."