By Reena Shah
INSPIRATION
Inspiring Life of Trevor Noah
Reena is Section Editor of the Inspiration section of Jain Digest. She is a USC graduate and currently teaches English and US History in middle school and high school. Her industry experience includes Market Research, Non- Profit and educational institutions. She practices deeper aspects of spirituality and is a follower of Shrimad Rajchandra Atma Tatva Research Centre, Mumbai.
“My whole life, comedy has been a tool I’ve used to process pain. And you’ve seen how we live in Soweto.” - Trevor Noah to Oprah Winfrey The life of Trevor Noah, the host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, is an incredible story of a mixedrace boy growing up in poverty amidst the ruthless oppression of apartheid South Africa who ended up entertaining the American public and the world at one of the popular TV institutions. He is one of the most popular faces in media who has developed an immense amount of compassion and humor while growing up in a rough environment. Noah has received various accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award win from nine nominations. He was named one of "The 35 Most Powerful People in New York Media" by The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 and 2018. In 2018, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In April 2018, he set up the Trevor Noah Foundation, a Johannesburg-based non-profit organization that equips orphans and vulnerable youth with the education, life skills, and social capital necessary to pursue further opportunities. This article is an attempt to look at snippets from his life and trace the inspirational qualities of a soul that transcends human barriers of race, religion, and color. Noah was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1984. With a Black mother and white, Swiss father, he was, as he wrote in his bestselling 2016 autobiography, Born a Crime. Under apartheid laws, which officially governed South Africa between 1948 and 1994, race was the country’s defining cultural and legal factor. The “Mixed Marriages Act of 1949” banned marriage between white people and people of color and other
laws enacted early in the regime prohibited people of different races from even living near one another.
Despite the hardships that he and his family faced in Africa, he grew up to be quite popular in South Africa with his sense of humor. He eventually came to America to be the successor of Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show”, one of the most famous talk shows. According to Jain philosophy, where and in which family we are born is part of our destiny (karma). But what we make out of it through hard work and purushaarth sets one apart and puts one on the path of progression.
Developing Fearlessness
Noah’s mother, Patricia and her mother, Nomalizo Frances Noah, raised him in the black township of Soweto during this tumultuous era in South Africa. Noah writes about one such dangerous situation in his book Born a Crime, when he had to jump out of the car to save himself; “He raced along Oxford Road, the lanes empty, no other cars out. I was sitting closest to the minibus’s sliding door. My mother sat next to me, holding baby Andrew. She looked out the window and then leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Trevor when he slows down at the next intersection, I’m going to open the door and we’re going to jump.’ ” Noah and his mom ran away from a man who might have killed them if they didn’t have courage to jump out of the car and run. It was an inspiration to read that even amidst such a situation, the two “started laughing …, and we stood there, … our arms and legs covered in blood and dirt, laughing together through the pain in the light of a petrol station on the side of a road in the middle of the night.” He had a tough childhood but still learned to have the courage to laugh through the pain. How many of us can laugh through our traumas? It requires a fearless soul to be able to come out of this smilingly.
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