When RGV becomes a Bruce Lee fanboy
- IndiaGlitz, [Tuesday,May 09 2017]
For a change, Ram Gopal Varma became someone's fanboy. Saying that Bruce Lee is the only one he found more interesting than sex, the 'Sarkar-3' director has written about how he was awestruck by the phenomenon as a teenager.
"I used to cycle all the way to a theatre 7 km away and watched 'Enter the Dragon' 17 times. Later, I would watch 'Return of the Dragon' 23 times I was obsessed about knowing of him and knowing about him to the smallest and minutest detail possible," he says.
Making a psychological analysis of why many youngsters would want to become a Bruce Lee, but not, say, a Mohammad Ali, RGV writes, "I always felt that if Bruce Lee was 6 inches taller he would not have become the legend he was. Its because he was just 5'7” and so small built that everybody and anybody could aspire to become like him. Nobody could have aspired to be a 6'2” heavyweight boxer like a Muhammad Ali or a Joe Frazier. That's because they look almost unreal and hence unreachable whereas an average guy will be the size of Bruce Lee which explains the rush of millions of people across the world to join Martial Arts schools of which I too was one".
He reveals that he had once wanted to emulate him, only to come a cropper. "..(A)fter a few sessions of trying to learn his art I realized how impossible it is to reach anywhere near Bruce Lee and so I abandoned my dream of becoming Bruce Lee and settled for the far less painful and much easier art of filmmaking. But inspite of abandoning Martial Arts my study of Bruce Lee and his thinking created a huge impact on me in various ways which would in time influence both my life and my films," he writes.