R Madhavan has been in the entertainment industry since the early 1990s, but before he started acting, Madhavan got a chance to live in Canada as an exchange student. In an earlier interview, Madhavan revealed that during his time in Canada, he got a major shock when he lived with families who “slaughtered cows for a living,” and he was a hardcore vegetarian.

‘Hardcore vegetarian lived with families that slaughtered cows for a living’

In a chat shared on the YouTube channel of Indian School of Business in 2023, he called the experience “very important for my formative years” and recalled the time when he lived in Stettler, Canada. “I got an opportunity to be an exchange student on behalf of Rotary and I went to Canada as an exchange student. I went to a place called Stettler, which was the wild, wild west. It’s cowboy country. I lived with cowboys. I am a hardcore vegetarian but I live with families that slaughtered cows for a living so all that was ‘adharma’ for me,” he said.

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‘Biggest adharma’ Madhavan experienced

Madhavan then went on to recall the “biggest adharma” that he experienced while being in the basketball team of his local school in Stettler. He recalled that being in the team was seen as a “huge achievement” for an Indian who wasn’t as tall as the other boys and shared that his “ordeal” began when he had to go over to the next town for seven days to play a series of matches.

“Like it happens over there, after the match, you come back to the boys locker room and you get into the shower. My ordeal started when I had to go into the shower because unlike what it is today, when you go to the men’s shower, it is just one pillar with six shower heads around it and all the boys go there like god made them and they take a shower together. It’s the most normal thing for them to do,” Madhavan recalled and said that the “nervousness” of getting into that shower was bigger than playing the game.

He shared that he came from a South Indian family where they never even moved around the house with a bare body, and thus, this was a challenge for him. “I didn’t know how I was going to muster up walking there and so I decided to say, ‘To hell with it. I am going to wear my underwear and not take that off’,” he shared.

‘Other boys wondered, what is he hiding?’

Madhavan said that since he chose to wear his underwear in the shower, all the boys around him looked at him in surprise. “When I went into the shower just wearing my underwear and the rest of them were not wearing anything, I cannot tell you how naked I felt because no one was looking at each other. They were all like, ‘What is he hiding?’ and I had to do that repetitively for seven days because the tournament was for seven days,” he said.

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Madhavan said that for the first few days, he tried to convince himself to follow the norm, but on the third day, he made a decision. “I realised, ‘That’s not me. I am never going to be comfortable so I kept myself covered for seven days’. It was during that time that I realised that if your instincts are telling you that if you are going to be uncomfortable doing something… And for you to have the guts to actually not go with what is considered a norm, then you will have the ability to be comfortable with yourself and that was a very essential quality to get into the film industry,” he said.