It is often said that there is no age limit to learning, and while it’s more often said than implemented, Bhagyashree actually stayed true to it. After taking a break from studies to focus on her career and family, the actor returned to her education at the age of 45. On National Education Day today, she reflects on how that move transformed her life.
For Bhagyashree, this second stint at education started due to being diagnosed with frozen shoulder. “After college, I would have wanted to go on for further studies, but I didn’t manage to do that because other things took up my time. Then somehow, fortunately what helped me open my mind was that a couple of years ago, I had a health scare that set me on a path of education again. I look at it as something that was predestined by God so that I could complete my education,” she says.
After her frozen shoulder diagnosis, Bhagyashree was told by doctors to go undergo surgery for its healing. But the actor chose to focus on a healthy lifestyle instead and educated herself about it. She did online courses in nutrition and fitness from University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University and American Fitness Professionals & Associates. “It was more of a learning process to understand how the body functions, what are the detriments and how to make it better. I did it to increase my own knowledge to help myself,” she says.
Was it scary to restart her learning journey at 45? “I can’t say scared but I was nervous. I wondered whether I could accomplish it, whether I would be able to finish it, but the fear of having an operation petrified me, and it started my journey of learning about nutrition. That turned things around for me and today at 55, I can say I am way stronger and healthier. The energy that I have and the things that I can do today, I don’t think I could do them when I was in my 30s,” she insists.
But the importance of education isn’t a newfound thing in Bhagyashree’s life. “When Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) happened, I told Sooraj (Barjatya, filmmaker) ji that I will attend all my lectures and am not going to give up on college just because I’m shooting. He actually adjusted the shooting time to make sure that I was able to do that. I used to reach college at 7 am, be there till lunch and then go for shoot to Madh Island. So, when people say that both acting and education can’t happen simultaneously, I feel what rubbish, I did that in the beginning itself. Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” she says.
The actor says she imbibed the same values in her kids, actors Abhimanyu Dassani and Avantika Dassani, too. “I never gave up on education, and I didn’t allow my children to. Abhimanyu was pretty upset with me for a long period of time as he said that ‘Mum, you have just kind of delayed the time where I could have done other things’ but today, he realises its importance,” she ends.