Shikha Malhotra made her Bollywood debut with the Shah Rukh Khan starter film, Fan in 2016. Apart from this, she has worked in several movies and web series, including Senthanal (2015), Running Shaadi (2017), Lucky Kabootar (2018 ), Kaanchli Life in a Slough (2020) and Majboori (2022). However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, she volunteered as a nurse at the BMC Hospital in Mumbai. Following this, she suffered from a brain stroke and right-side paralysis. Now, in an interview, Sikha opened up about her inspirational recovery journey and other aspects of her life.
In an interview with Pinkvilla, Shikha Malhotra talked about recovering from brain stroke and paralysis. She also discussed her return to the acting scene. Sikha revealed that she contracted the virus while working in the ICU for over a year during the Covid-19 pandemic. For this, she was admitted to the hospital for around a month. However, she suffered a brain stroke due to the same and then a right-side paralysis. Sharing about her recovery process, Shikha mentioned she started doing yoga, Kathak and singing. She said:
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“I stayed paralyzed for a long time. After I got discharged I wasn’t able to walk properly. I used to get up every morning, hold the walls and try to walk. Due to steroids my weight was constantly increasing, My mother, who is a retired nurse, was taking care of me. It was a whole lot of struggle to become normal after paralysis. I started doing yoga, Kathak, and classical singing. It used to hurt a lot but I thought not to give up.”
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In the same conversation, Sikha mentioned that she decided to return to the film industry after she recovered. However, the actress narrated an incident that when she auditioned for a role in Imtiaz Ali’s film, Chamkila starring Parineeti Chopra and Diljit Dosanjh, she had taken a drastic decision of never returning to acting. Shikha shared that upon looking at the audition file, she looked extremely old and asked them to delete it. She added:
“Around one year later when I recovered, I decided to return to acting. I was feeling so down. A lead actor's frame is very cliche. I had just recovered and I felt like I had to climb another mountain. I got a call from Mukesh Chabra for an audition. When I saw my audition, I looked so old. I immediately asked them to delete it. They told me I did good but I wanted them to delete it. I told them, ‘I am very young. I may not look like it.’ This was in mid 2022 and then I decided to stop giving auditions and I wanted to stay away.”
Further, in the same conversation, Shikha mentioned that her mother, Shobha Devi, who herself is a nurse, motivated her to work on herself when she thought about quitting the acting profession. The actress then worked hard and now, she has fully recovered and is now back to her acting career. However, she wanted to carry the lessons she learned during her frontline service with her as she returned to the entertainment industry.
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Taking to her IG handle, on July 26, 2023, Sikha shared a series of pictures of herself and showed her massive transformation after suffering a brain stroke. In all the pictures, she made collages of the times when she worked in the frontline, following when she struggled with brain stroke and paralysis, along with her current self donning a pink-hued bikini. Sharing the posts, she wrote a long caption mentioning how she got the zeal to work hard to fight with the negative thoughts and come back to life. An excerpt from her long note in Hindi could be read as:
"My transformation is not just limited to this bikini. This post is for those who want to get back their lost game, who want to overcome every problem in life that has broken them, I want to tell that the power of will."
What do you think about Sikha's inspirational journey? Let us know!
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