Being thankful for what you have — that's probably one of the best lessons you could learn in life. At least, that's what led 26-year-old Karthik Gopal to look at life positively, despite all the hardships. His recently released short film, Tippen Box, tries to drive home that very idea into the minds of the audience.
The 18-minute short film features a young school boy, who is ashamed to bring his lunch box to school, as he doesn't want to feel inferior to the other kids who have fancier boxes. So, every day he runs home during the break to have lunch, and arrives late for the next class. He gets punished almost every day, but for him, anything is better than bearing the shame he would feel if his friends were to see his cheap tiffin box. He wants to ask his father for a new one, but realises that his father doesn't even have a pair of sandals for himself. So, he holds himself back and decides to keep running home for lunch.
What the film tries to portray is that even something as trivial as a tiffin box can affect a child's self-confidence drastically. It may sound made-up to some of us, but the fact of the matter is that this isn’t just any story, it’s Karthik's own life that inspired the film. He was brought up in a small village in Erode, Tamil Nadu and went to a government school nearby. Every day, he would run two kilometres just to have lunch at home. "I couldn't face my friends looking down on me. I wanted to have what everyone else had," says Karthik, sheepishly.
Today, an employee at TCS, he has realised that there were so many things that he had that others might have longed for. "We may have something that we may not value, but others might be dreaming about it. Our wants and desires will never end. We've just got to learn to be happy with what we have," says a very wise Karthik.
Karthik, who went on to study at a government college in Salem, says that it was there that he was first introduced to films and he fell in love with it instantly. He did a short course on film-making and has directed five short films so far. "People from underprivileged backgrounds have a lot to say. We need more opportunities to share our stories," believes Karthik.
