Ram Gopal Varma Quotes

If something doesn’t work, people will say ‘we told you so’, and if it works, they will come up with a new theory and will conveniently forget what they had said earlier.

We live the life of others when we read their thoughts.’ —Ayn Rand

My world consists of powerful people, intense music, sexy women, vodka, gangsters, ghosts and philosophies which I can twist and turn to my convenience.

Random things keep happening, which are completely out of your control, and you can only control your reaction to an out-of-control situation. My real success, I believe, lies in my ability to make decisions and implement them superfast.

When someone is up there and he deserves to be up there, try to learn from what he has achieved. If you think he doesn’t deserve it, still try to learn from what he has achieved and add your own capability to it, as it might result in you climbing higher than him. But you should not sit on the ground, gazing at him with hatred and waiting for him to fall, because his descent won’t help you reach the top. And also you might often miss the point that people whom you look down upon may actually be far more capable than you. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I feel it’s truly wasteful to expend your energy in hating someone.

trudged

So in short, the success of a film is due to the contribution of the actors and technicians in excess of my expectations, which is why it belongs to them, while failure belongs to me alone, as it means that I failed in channelizing their equally great contributions to their intended destination.

The reason I started the video library was that I knew around twenty of my friends and relatives owned video players. So I thought that if between them they hired twenty cassettes, at ₹10 a cassette a day, I would get ₹200 a day or ₹6,000 a month, which was the running cost of my shop. Anything extra, I thought, would be a profit which I could take a chance upon. Within a month of starting my shop, I was renting out more than 100 cassettes a day, but none of the twenty people I had counted upon ever came to my shop. If they did, they never paid, as they were my friends or were related to me. So in effect, what I had counted upon didn’t happen and success came from unexpected quarters. But I know in my heart that if I had not banked on those twenty people, there was no way I would have started my shop.

When someone is up there and he deserves to be up there, try to learn from what he has achieved. If you think he doesn’t deserve it, still try to learn from what he has achieved and add your own capability to it, as it might result in you climbing higher than him. But you should not sit on the ground, gazing at him with hatred and waiting for him to fall, because his descent won’t help you reach the top. And also you might often miss the point that people whom you look down upon may actually be far more capable than you.

that I always found a very strong resemblance between the rivalries and internal politics in the underworld and normal office politics and rivalries, because human nature is the same everywhere. The people who work in any company have their own individualities and intelligence levels and the only thing common among them is the ambition and greed to reach the top. So even though the company as whole is working towards a goal, the personal ambitions will conflict with each other, creating politics, frustration, jealousy, etc.

Incidentally, the best birthday greeting I have ever received was in the form of an sms from an unknown number: ‘Hey Ramu, tere zindagi ka ek aur saal khatam…Marte Raho!

I believe that the obsession with birthdays is primarily a function of the fear most individuals have that their existence might not matter to anybody else.

I would any day go on deciding to make good, bad and ugly films rather than sit in a coffee shop, having endless cups of coffee, tearing down others’ films and planning a masterpiece in the future, which might never go on the floors.

Anyway, the whole point is that I am just so fascinated with how the cycle of fortune keeps on throwing people in and out of dustbins.

You’re Only as Good as Your Last Film

If all your life is geared towards securing yourself against failure and death, and you never stop to enjoy the present, why live at all?