Sunday Blog #3: The sights and sounds of a celebrity death
Come to us, Lazarus, it's time for performative outrage.
Around this time last Sunday, news of Sushant Singh Rajput’s death started trickling into our social media timelines. It was as unbelievable as it was gut-wrenching. Sushant was only 34 and, by all accounts, a seriously promising talent who was on the way up. Everything about him pointed to a life beginning to bloom. That he chose death hit everyone harder than expected. Within minutes, #mentalhealth was trending on Twitter.
In a few hours, shock gave way to disgust. Reporters from prime-time news channels had reached Sushant’s home in Patna, pointed microphones and cameras at his grieving family, and asked them the one question they were obviously waiting to answer all this while - “Kaisa lag haha hai aapko?” (How are you feeling?) By this time, the editors of a news channel had found it within themselves to broadcast, on national television, a picture of Sushant’s dead body. One anchor ran cricket puns about Sushant’s death on the main channel ticker; another prodded her reporter to get a few reactions from his family. Death can be commodified and sold.
(image credit: this article)
Messages of shock and horror started pouring in from Bollywood. As the evening turned into night, almost every cinema personality of consequence laid out messages for their departed colleague. But we seldom take things at face value. Into a timeline of mental health, therapy, and suicide prevention helplines, a conversation around the sincerity behind some of those messages began to take shape. A well known hairstylist spoke about how Sushant had very few friends in the industry and how it’s all a family business where outsiders weren’t encouraged. Clips where actors and hosts admitted to not knowing much about Sushant’s career circulated through the internet. And thus began the very public outrage.
It played out in three parts. It started with wistful eulogies for a rank outsider who made a mark on the industry through skill and perseverance. Everyone who spoke about Sushant, reminisced fondly about his acting chops, his drive to succeed, and his mild, affable nature. I have watched only one of his movies - the Dhoni biopic - but his ability was obvious. People involved in the making of that movie spoke about the lengths he went to for nailing down the details of MS Dhoni’s batting and personality.
That conversation changed course very soon. Kangana Ranaut released a video - of course she did - where she spoke about the Insiders Club of Bollywood and how quality art rarely gets noticed. In her words, a crap movie like Gully Boy cannot be winning awards. Kangana has been at the forefront of the anti-nepotism movement, if there exists one, in Bollywood. A few years back, she went to Karan Johar’s talk show and told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was the flag bearer of nepotism in the industry. Since then, she has been very vocal about the unfairness of an environment where talent and ability aren’t always the tickets for opportunity.
Then came the vilification of said Insiders Club, even from within the machine. The conversation around favouritism in Bollywood has lasted long enough for a thorough study to be done; and when given the chance, we lapped up the theory that a talent like Sushant went down a bad mental spiral because he was kept away from the front tables of Bollywood, while many others were raking in millions and dancing with the who’s who merely because of their statures and surnames. We even psychoanalysed his social media updates. Was he giving us a signal through his Van Gogh cover picture on Twitter? The accuracy of all those theories can, at best, be conjecture because the only one who could put a definitive stamp is no more, but speculators gon’ speculate.
That said, Insiders Club is too vague a concept for peak outrage™. Spurred on by the relentless theme of nepotism as the enemy of all things holy, we didn’t have to look far for something more specific. In Karan Johar and the batch of star-kids he has launched, we found the targets of our ire. Change.org campaigns began to fly, as did blog posts about the need to boycott entire sections of Bollywood. The same audience who had made Karan Johar what he is by thronging the theatres every time a movie of his released, who shared Koffee with Karan videos because Bollywood gossip is tasty, now began to question the legitimacy of his methods. Alia Bhatt, an actor who is beginning to weave a garland of stirring movie performances, was now attracting slander because of her surname.
Within a day of Sushant’s death and the widespread dialogue around the need to be kinder, Karan Johar and Alia Bhatt were trending on Twitter, and the language used in those tweets wasn’t what you’d call kind. Apparently, the only way to fight a cut-throat industry is by harassing them on social media. The dexterity it must take to be a mental health warrior and a bully on the same post is something I admire endlessly. Maybe I’ll get there one day if I try hard enough.
Look, nepotism is real, very real, but maybe we don’t yet know everything about it. Here’s Abhishek Bannerjee, an established casting director and actor, and more importantly, an outsider, explaining the scope of nepotism and favouritism in Bollywood. Just as real is the negative impact on your mental health if you are working in an industry as competitive, public, and problematic as Bollywood. We grieved for Sushant because very few can sustain the kind of dedication and motivation, over years, that is needed to succeed in his craft. But which industry, especially in a country as populous and brimming with talent as India, is easy to make a mark in?
Bollywood has many issues, and the lack of equal opportunities is one too, but if the industry itself was as rabidly averse to outsiders as last week’s conversations would have you believe, there wouldn’t be space for Nawazuddin Siddiqui or Manoj Bajpayee to play critically acclaimed roles. Bollywood, right now, is blessed with an entire bunch of such self-made, talented, artists and another bunch of filmmakers who are happy to cast them over someone with a more glittery name. Conversely, there are enough examples of actors from famous families who haven’t enjoyed a sustained career, because, after a point, producers stopped investing their money on someone who might not be the brightest bulb in the room. Bollywood’s biggest star today was an outsider once; the son of Bollywood’s biggest star from yesteryears rarely gets cast anymore.
Sushant’s death was a shocking, terrible event; and there is little doubt that he was an honest upstart in a difficult environment. But maybe we can add a little nuance to an important discussion, and while we are it, be kind while outraging. We point fingers at the media for being insensitive; we can do with a little bit of sensitivity ourselves. We’d be shattered if someone told us that our work habits were, in some way, responsible for a colleague taking their life.
Maybe developing empathy could be a good start towards kindness. It shouldn’t take much.
This Week
Articles
Guardian longread on tourism post coronavirus
Sid Monga feature on the need to view YouTube channels which post archival cricket footage as evangelists of the game
Guardian article on the legacy left by Jonah Lomu
Mukul Kesavan on why Paatal Lok is absolutely brilliant
Book
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi: The premise of a coffee shop which allows you to travel back in time got my attention. The story is suitably brilliant.
Until next time.