Tom's Blog on Life

In 2007, a 26-year-old actor from New Delhi walked onto a Hollywood set with almost no experience. His name was Kunal Nayyar. He had been born in London to Indian parents, raised in India from the age of 3, and had come to America for higher education. He had only 2 acting credits to his name. Nobody could have guessed what was about to happen.

The show was called The Big Bang Theory. He was cast as Rajesh Koothrappali, a shy astrophysicist who could not even speak to women without help. His salary in season 1 was $45,000 per episode.

12 seasons and 279 episodes later, the show became one of the most successful sitcoms in television history. By the final seasons, Kunal and his 4 original co-stars were each earning a reported $1 million per episode. Forbes ranked him as the 3rd highest-paid TV actor in the entire world in 2015 and again in 2018, with annual earnings of $20 million and $23.5 million.

Money on a scale most of us cannot really picture.

He could have done what so many do at that level. Bought a fleet of cars. Built a mansion. Lived loudly. Disappeared into the kind of life that magazines love to photograph.

He did not.

Years after the show ended, in a quiet interview with The i Paper in late 2025, Kunal Nayyar revealed what he had really been doing with his money. Sitting calmly, almost as if he were talking about a small hobby, he explained it.

“Money has given me greater freedom,” he said. “And the greatest gift is the ability to give back, to change people’s lives.”

Then he described his nighttime ritual.

After dinner, after the world quiets down, he opens GoFundMe — the crowdfunding platform where families post their final pleas for help with medical bills, surgeries, and treatments they cannot afford. He scrolls. He reads stories of strangers — parents, children, sick people simply asking the internet for help. He picks a few. And then, without ever revealing his name, he pays.

He pays for a child’s chemotherapy. He pays for a surgery. He pays off a cancer bill a family would have spent the rest of their lives trying to clear. They never know it was him.

“That’s my masked vigilante thing,” he said, almost embarrassed by the words.

He does not stop there.

Alongside his wife, the former Miss India and fashion designer Neha Kapur, he quietly funds university scholarships for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds — kids whose families could never afford to send them to college. They also support animal charities, because, in his own words, “we love dogs.”

He does not make a show of any of it. There are no foundations with his face on the wall. No fundraising galas. No press tours. Just a man at home, late at night, choosing a stranger to save.

When asked why, he said something that has stayed with people who heard it.

“Right now people are not happy because we are all expecting someone else to be kind. We are expecting a president or a politician, some leader, to come and bring us world peace. But there is no world peace if your neighbour comes to your door wanting some sugar for their tea and you lock it against them and say, get away.”

In other words — be the neighbour. Open the door. Hand over the sugar.

For Kunal Nayyar, money is not a trophy. It is a tool. It is the rare kind of wealth that does not weigh on him. “It feels like a grace from the universe,” he said.

He still works. He has his own production company, Good Karma Productions. He stars in films — most recently Christmas Karma (2025), a musical reimagining of A Christmas Carol where he plays a modern-day Indian Scrooge whose obsession with wealth is rooted in trauma. The role almost feels like a wink at his own life.

Except in real life, Kunal Nayyar never needed a ghost to teach him the lesson.

He learned it on his own — that the truest measure of what we have is not what we hold on to, but what we quietly give away.

Somewhere tonight, a family is opening an email, looking at a GoFundMe page, and finding that someone they will never meet has paid for their child’s surgery. They will cry. They will not know who. They will whisper a small thank you into an empty room.

And somewhere across the world, the man who paid will already be asleep, ready for the next day.

He does not need to know what happens next.

For him, that is the whole point.

Vienna, Austria. June 3, 1961.

The most dangerous meeting of the Cold War era has just begun.

John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev — the leaders of the two nuclear superpowers whose weapons are pointed at each other across an ocean — are sitting down to dinner. The world’s future is genuinely uncertain. Diplomats are anxious. Translators are poised. Everyone in the room knows that what is said at this table will matter.

At Khrushchev’s side sits Jacqueline Kennedy.

She is 31 years old, speaks French and Italian and Spanish fluently, and has spent the day so thoroughly charming Paris that French President Charles de Gaulle — a man not known for being charmed — described her as extraordinary. JFK will joke the next day that he is simply “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”

Now she is seated next to the Soviet Premier at dinner.

They talk. The conversation moves. And then — “She ran out of things to talk about,“ as her daughter Caroline would later tell it, “so she asked about the dog, Strelka, that the Russians had shot into space. During the conversation, my mother asked about Strelka’s puppies.”

A few months later, a package arrived at the White House.

“A few months later, a puppy arrived and my father had no idea where the dog came from and couldn’t believe my mother had done that.“

The puppy’s name was Pushinka.

Russian for “Fluffy.” A white, mixed-breed puppy, the daughter of Strelka — one of two Soviet space dogs who had become the first living creatures to orbit the Earth and return home safely, aboard the Soviet spacecraft Korabl-Sputnik 2 in 1960.

She arrived in the United States with her own Soviet passport, listing her as “a non-breed type.”

Because this was 1961, and because the United States and the Soviet Union were in the middle of a nuclear standoff, the White House was not simply going to let a Russian dog wander in unexamined. Pushinka was taken to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and examined thoroughly before she was permitted to settle into her new home — checked for any listening devices the Soviets might have thought to embed in a puppy.

She was clean.

She was welcomed.

And shortly after settling in, she fell in love with Charlie — the Kennedy family’s Welsh terrier — and eventually produced four puppies of her own. Kennedy, with the dry wit his letters reveal, called them the “pupniks.”

In June 1961, Kennedy wrote to Khrushchev: “Mrs. Kennedy and I were particularly pleased to receive Pushinka. Her flight from the Soviet Union to the United States was not as dramatic as the flight of her mother, nevertheless, it was a long voyage and she stood it well.”

Two men. Enough nuclear weapons between them to end civilization. Writing to each other about a dog’s flight from Moscow.

At its core, the Cold War was fought between governments and ideologies and weapons systems. But its edges were softened, occasionally, by moments like this — accidental, human, and entirely Jackie’s doing.

The puppy was not a one-off.

Jacqueline Kennedy understood something about power that most politicians learn too late, if they learn it at all: that the most durable kind of influence is not exercised through force or position, but through connection. Through language. Through the ability to make someone feel seen and heard and respected.

She spoke French and had it on good authority — from de Gaulle himself — that her command of it was that of an educated native. When she accompanied JFK to Paris in 1961 and addressed the French people in their own language, the reception was unlike anything an American leader had ever received. When she visited India and Pakistan the following year, she drew crowds of hundreds of thousands. Diplomatic handlers struggled to keep up with the goodwill she generated simply by being present, and genuinely fluent, and genuinely interested.

She was not performing interest. That was the thing about her that no one could manufacture. She actually wanted to know about Khrushchev’s dog.

At home, she was rebuilding something else.

When Jackie moved into the White House in January 1961, she found the mansion in a state that she found quietly embarrassing — a residence of the leader of the free world furnished with mismatched pieces and reproductions. She believed that the White House was not merely the president’s house. It was the people’s house — a living museum of American history that deserved to be treated as such.

She formed a committee. She tracked down authentic period furniture that had been sold off over decades. She acquired paintings, chandeliers, manuscripts, and objects that told the story of the nation with the seriousness that story deserved.

And then, in February 1962, she invited the American people inside.

The televised tour of the White House — Jackie moving through room after room, explaining the history of each object with the authority of a trained curator — was watched by approximately 56 million people. It remains one of the highest-rated television broadcasts in history. The Television Academy recognized her with a special Trustees Award, the only time that honor has been given to a First Lady.

She wasn’t just showing people a beautiful house. She was telling them that beauty and history and culture were theirs — that they belonged to everyone, not only to those who happened to live inside the gates.

Then came November 22, 1963.

What Jackie did in the hours, days, and weeks after Dallas is one of the most documented and still most difficult things to fully comprehend. She organized the state funeral with historical precision — modeled on Lincoln’s, because she believed the gravity of the moment required that kind of acknowledgment. She stood at the graveside in the same pink suit she had worn on the plane back from Dallas, because she wanted the world to see what had been done.

And weeks later, she gave one carefully chosen interview — to the journalist Theodore White of Life Magazine — in which she introduced the image that would define her husband’s presidency forever.

She said it reminded her of the musical they both loved: Camelot.

“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

She chose those words deliberately. She told White she wanted that image preserved. He published it exactly as she asked.

Jackie Kennedy understood that history is not only what happens — it is what is remembered, and how it is framed, and by whom. She spent the rest of her life making sure the story was told right.

There is a version of Jacqueline Kennedy that history sometimes reduces to style — the pillbox hat, the pink suit, the poise under pressure. That version is not wrong, exactly. She had all of those things, and they mattered.

But the fuller picture is this:

A woman who accidentally negotiated a moment of Cold War warmth by asking about a dog at a dinner table. Who checked a Soviet puppy for listening devices and then let her children teach it to slide down the playground slide. Who spoke to the French in their own language and made them love America for an afternoon. Who stood in the East Room and told 56 million people that this house — this history — belonged to them.

And who, in the most devastating moment of her life, made sure that what had happened was not just mourned, but remembered, with the weight it deserved.

She was not a witness to history.

She was, quietly and deliberately, one of its most skillful authors.

In 1993, a file clerk with no college degree, no law training, and three kids to feed was handed a real estate file.

Inside were medical records.

That made no sense.

Her name was Erin Brockovich, and at that point, life had already hit her hard. Married young. Divorced twice before 30. Working retail jobs, waitressing, anything that kept food on the table.

By 1991, she was filing paperwork at a small California law firm, answering phones and barely covering rent.

Then came the file from a tiny desert town called Hinkley.

She kept reading. Then pulled more files. Same town. Different families. Cancer. Tumors. Miscarriages. Far too many for a place that small.

Something was wrong in Hinkley.

Everybody seemed sick.

Erin started calling residents. Every conversation sounded the same. Someone had cancer. Someone had died young. Someone couldn’t have children.

Then she found letters from Pacific Gas and Electric.

PG&E mentioned chromium in the water—chromium 3, they claimed. Harmless. Completely safe.

But Erin got suspicious.

She went to the library and taught herself everything she could about chromium. There were two forms. Chromium 3 was harmless.

Chromium 6 caused cancer.

That discovery changed everything.

Digging through PG&E’s internal records, she uncovered memos between engineers. They knew it was chromium 6 all along. They had known since 1965, while telling the town there was nothing to fear.

For years, PG&E used chromium 6 in cooling towers, dumping contaminated wastewater into open ponds with nothing protecting the groundwater beneath. Hundreds of millions of gallons seeped into the water Hinkley families drank every day.

Engineers raised alarms.

Management buried them.

And for decades, people kept drinking poisoned water without knowing why they were getting sick.

Erin drove to Hinkley herself, knocking door to door. A woman with breast cancer at 30. A man with a brain tumor at 40. Couples shattered by repeated miscarriages. Children suffering constant nosebleeds.

She asked every family one question: do you want to sue?

More than 600 said yes.

PG&E responded with powerful attorneys and endless excuses, blaming smoking, diet, anything except their own deception.

Then, on July 2, 1996, the company settled.

$333 million. The largest direct-action lawsuit settlement in American history at the time.

A single mother with no law degree had uncovered a forty-year cover-up hiding inside an ordinary file.

Erin Brockovich proved that sometimes the most dangerous thing in the world is an ordinary person who refuses to stop asking questions.

“You cannot be a good mountaineer, however great your ability, unless you are cheerful and have the spirit of comradeship. Friends are as important as achievement. …teamwork is the one key to success and that selfishness only makes a man small. No man, on a mountain or elsewhere, gets more out of anything than he puts into it. Be great, make others great.” — Tenzing Norgay Sherpa, Tiger of the Snows.