Actor-producer Rana Daggubati and director Nag Ashwin recently attended the Synapse 2024 event in Gurgaon. The actor got candid about his health struggles in the past while there, talking about how he had turned into a mean person due to his illness. For the unversed, Rana underwent a kidney transplant a few years ago and a cornea transplant at a young age.

‘You look at life differently’

Rana stated at the event that while he was in the ‘most beautiful hospital’ he was still discontent. “I was at Mayo (Clinic in the US), it’s the only place we could figure out what had happened to me. It’s funny because once you get into this life-threatening zone, you start looking at life very differently,” he said. He stated that his worldview has shifted since then. “Till then, everything I built or moved me forward had me in the centre. But you realise that’s not how things should be,” he added.

‘I turned into a mean person’

While the illness was taxing on him physically, Rana revealed that he turned mean also due to it. “Everyone saw me bulked up for Baahubali. So, everyone asked if I was ill and I didn’t want to answer them. It was harder for me to live with people in the city, it was too much. I started becoming a slightly mean person,” he said, adding, “There was a point when if people asked about my health, I said unless you can donate a kidney or an eye, don’t ask about it. I didn’t like what I was doing.”

‘Nature is a great healer’

Even as Rana healed physically from the illness, he got to shoot in the jungle for Prabhu Solomon’s Tamil film Kaadan, which was released as Aranya in Telugu and Haathi Mere Saathi in Hindi. “Thankfully, I got the chance to shoot in the jungle, I was there for almost a year. I shot with elephants. Nobody judged me there, nobody there cared if I was sick. The silence there is what I needed in my life. Nature is a greater healer than anything else,” he said.