Sonu Sood, the name which has ruled during the pandemic and took the internet by storm. A small-town guy hailing from Moga, Punjab who believed in his hard work and had no godfather he took a leap of faith and entered the film industry. Over the years, he has been known for his acting and his fitness regime little did the world know that he would be given a title of a “Messiah” and will be conferred with Special Humanitarian award by United Nations Development programme (UNDP) for his philanthropic contributions during the coronavirus.
The engineer turned actor who has worked in a number of regional films has won Andhra Pradesh Nandi Award for the best villain and Filmfare award back in 2009. In the year 2010, he got Apsara Award for the best negative role for his movie Dabangg. In 2016, he fulfilled his dream of establishing his own production house called “Shakti Sagar Productions” which is named after his father.
In the past year, when the world was in lockdown, he did the most heroic act being in a global pandemic. Initially he used to distribute food among the under-privileged until a wage worker asked him to pack food for him for seven to eight days as he had to walk all they way to his hometown with his kids and pregnant wife. The actor asked the worker to give him two days. After a few weeks, he was all over the news and became an overnight sensation for his humanitarian service.
He had lent his hands to nearly thousands of families of migrant workers, this popular initiative was known as #gharbhejo with his friend Neeti Goel. Initially he used to have granted help to thousands of people to return to their home states. He had arranged buses and trains for their travel and also provided them with financial support. As the medical staff members of hospitals had to deal with corona patients on a daily basis many used to live far away from their homes and hometowns, He took a charge to open his Juhu Hotel in Mumbai for them to stay which was free of cost. The pandemic had led to most industries and businesses, shutting down which resulted to unemployment and food insecurities. But the most affected people were the ones working in informal sector they were struggling to obtain three meals per day, the actor took this into consideration and launched Shakti Annadaman, keeping an objective of feeding over 45,000 every day in Mumbai. The lockdown also made it difficult to commute to their hometowns and many took a decision to set their journeys on foot, some attempted to walk over 1,100 kilometers in the hope of reaching to a safer place, Sonu Sood has been a migrant himself and he could empathize with the people not being able to return to their families and homes, he began to coordinate with Maharashtra and Karnataka Governments to arrange busses for them.
On his 47th birthday, he created an app called “Pravasi Rojgar” to provide opportunities for employment to many workers who have lost their daily source of bread and butter. The idea was to built an app which aimed at connecting the job searchers to people who provide jobs, companies like Amazon, Trident, Sodexo, Portea and Urban co. are a few of them. The frontline workers who are the police and doctors have been given 1,500 PPE kits to paramedics across the state of Punjab and the foundation has donated over 25,000 face shields Mumbai Police.
He has proved that kindness will always take over anything. He has managed to touch so many lives that a number of workers have named their kids after him and has been called as their “God”. He taught as that the ultimate happiness comes from giving!
Eduindex News 