Sudhanshu Pandey: My most successful moment would be working with Mr Rajnikanth

For actor Sudhanshu Pandey, success is much more than just reaching a certain position in your career. It is experiences, respect and love that you go through in your career path.

“I've always believed that luck and hard work go hand-in-hand. One can be pure luck as well. But you can be lucky to get an opportunity. You can be lucky to get a second opportunity, but if you do not work hard, you can't sustain the opportunity, you can't succeed, and you can't sustain the success or your position for a very long time. So, it is imperative that you work very, very hard, even if you're very lucky because without hard work there is no success, at least in the long term,” he says.

He adds, “I realised that I am successful the day I started feeling a lot of respect around me for myself. I saw people talking about me. I felt that I really earned a lot of respect in so many years. For me, that is a true measure of success. To me, success is when you achieve a certain position in your career in your industry. But that is one part of success. But success, for me, always meant how much love and respect I've earned from the people who have worked with me and the people who are around me. That is something that completes the definition of success for me.”

Ask him which was the most successful moment in his career journey, and he says, “My most successful moment would be working with Mr Rajnikanth. I did a negative role in a film called Robot 2.0 which gave me an opportunity to work with him. I realised the meaning of true success that day. He has the kind of stardom which I don't think anybody else in this country enjoys. Despite the kind of dizzying heights he's seen in his life, he's still so grounded and humble.”

However, one must not get carried away with the success around us, he says, “One should always keep in mind that nothing is permanent, neither failure nor success. We have to keep in mind that we will see very good times or very successful times and then we might see really bad times. In order to be able to deal with such ups and downs where we are at crazy heights and to be very stable mentally and stay humble. And I think our behaviour is what takes us a long way, in this industry or anywhere in life. Even if you're going through bad times or worse times, that you can't imagine. If your behaviour has been good, your conduct has been good throughout your career, people would still want to work with you and they would. It's only a matter of time before you can resurrect yourself with the help of those people who have always been sure to do for your conduct. So yes, success is not permanent and neither is failure.”