Calcutta, Dec. 15: On Australia Day in January 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was meeting the recipients of the Australian of the Year awardees at his Canberra residence The Lodge. When he shook the hand of the winner from Tasmania, the hand came off. As he stood bewildered, clutching the detached arm, others present like Adam Gilchrist and Glenn McGrath cracked up laughing at the prank.

Recounting the incident at the NSHM Knowledge Campus in Tollygunge on Thursday, the prankster, Sam Cawthorn, explained that he had wanted to stand out. "The Prime Minister had no idea that I had a prosthetic arm. And I wanted him to remember meeting me. The press clicked the moment and he mentioned me in his Australia Day speech."

This is just one of the ways that Cawthorn bounces forward, a term he has coined as a motivational speaker and author. It means to bounce out of a crisis and get better. After all, he had already done it himself, by being back from the dead. Literally.

In October 2006, 26-year-old Cawthorn, a father of two, married to his high school sweetheart and working for the department of education, employment and workplace relations of the Australian government as a youth futurist (a strategist predicting trends among the youth), was driving down a highway when he fell asleep at the wheel. His car veered on to the opposite side and had a head-on collision with a semi-trailor truck. The vehicles together were travelling at a speed of 206kmph.

"The crash woke me up but after 18 minutes I passed out and my heart stopped beating for three-and-a-half minutes. The paramedics pronounced me dead."

The first miracle was his heart reviving on resuscitation. When he came to in the hospital, his big family of 10 siblings were all around him and the first words he heard were of his mother Annie, a Kharagpur-born Indian who had married a Scotsman: "Samuel, you naughty boy..."

The second miracle was his recovery. "My elbow was ripped from my arm and flung 25m away from the car. I had six broken ribs, a broken hip, femur and tibula, a lacerated liver, a punctured kidney, both my lungs had collapsed." After being in an induced coma for six days, he spent five months in hospital and was told he would never walk again. But a year later he did.

His right leg cannot be folded and he uses a bionic arm. And worst of all, he suffers every moment from phantom pain, a pins-and-needles sensation which sometimes wakes him up in his sleep. "Every day I have a choice, whether I live as a victim and wallow in my pain or pick myself up, dust myself off and bounce forward. I choose the latter."

So he would rather gloat about his eight arms, including the "most advanced bionic arm in the world" that he can programme with his iPhone. "I have an app with which I can control it. How cool is that!" His other arms are customised for specific roles like playing golf or 8-ball pool. He can even play acoustic guitar.

Ricky Ponting's junior in Brooks High School ("He was good in every sport he played"), Crawthorn was himself a state champion in swimming but had got kicked out of school after falling in bad company. "I do not have a college degree. But I have spoken on stage with Bill Clinton, Michael Jordan, Richard Branson and the Dalai Lama."

As CEO of Speakers Institute and author of self-help books, he crisscrosses continents. He has been to 30 countries and is a frequent traveller to India, which he visited for the first time only nine years ago. "Wish my mother had taught me some Hindi," he says, sounding wistful for the only time in the two hours that Metro spent with him.