Skip to main content

Death of a star



Sushant Singh Rajput apparently had everything: wealth, fame, talents, intellect, and a noble heart. The ingredients for a happy and contented life were complete. What went wrong then?

We don’t know yet. Like a lot of other people, I’m left wondering why a man of Rajput’s stature should have put a wretched end to his life? He was doing well not only for himself but also for the world and there was so much more that he could contribute.

He was generous to a fault. He contributed generously when disasters struck. He helped Kerala with a contribution of no less than one crore rupees during the 2018 floods. In the same year, he donated Rs 1.25 crore to the Nagaland Chief Minister’s Relief Fund, again to help flood victims there. He went out of his way to help women-led start-ups and children’s education. In short, he wanted to create a better world. He had great dreams.

What a noble soul!

Did that nobility kill him? This is my conjecture. I don’t know why he chose to end his life this way.

Was he too good for this world? This is a question that refuses to leave me.

Life is essentially a tragedy though we make it look like comedy. Comedification is our success. We cope with the ineluctable miseries of life by pretending that they are comic. Jealousy and greed, sheer insensitivity, piggybacking on others’ successes, poaching on the one-cent land of the other when you have a thousand acres already… Add to all that the insanities perpetrated in the name of patriotism, gods, culture, and what not.

Is it comedy or tragedy?

I don’t know whether Rajput was caught between the horns of that dilemma. There are times when death lured me because I was caught in that ugly middle position. But I survived each time because I accepted the essential insanity of human existence. I accepted my own insanity too.

I didn’t pretend that life was a hilarious comedy. I wept in the darkness of my solitude when I couldn’t bear the pain of life anymore. I didn’t go out of my way to hide what I get up to in the middle of the night, in my anxious moments, when perplexity hit me hard in the solar plexus.

I wish life were kinder to Rajput. And a lot of others. It is good to see stars shining rather than blinking out prematurely.



Comments

  1. Sonia DograJune 15, 2020 at 8:50 AM

    The helplessness you feel when all around you is crumbling and you can't do a thing about it, is hard to put away. The more sensitive, the more noble you are the harder it gets. I've often tried to do little things for the ones I can but it never seems enough and you are left feeling empty despite having everything. The unfairness of the world gets on to you. Presently, anyway, the world is becoming too much to handle. So I do agree with your observation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. rupam sarmaJune 15, 2020 at 9:29 AM

    So sad _()_ Prayers

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ila VarmaJune 15, 2020 at 10:39 AM

    No one knows the reason what took him away, but a kind request to the youngsters, "Never Ever Give Up even in adversity. There is a silver lining behind dark clouds and the time will pass too. Life will be monotonous if we don't have roller coaster ride, accept the moment as it comes and don't rely on others for your goal. It is yours and you have to achieve."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Amit PattnaikJune 15, 2020 at 6:46 PM

    We all have different thresholds for tolerating pain, and we all have different points of no return. So we may not probably fully understand as to why some of us choose death. May be, all they needed was a good enough reason to live; and they couldn't find one!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Rajeev MoothedathJune 15, 2020 at 7:49 PM

    It was a very shocking news! Your post discusses all the aspects with sensitivity.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ira MishraJune 15, 2020 at 8:35 PM

    With the passing day... And all such news... Life has started to seem tragically a comedy... Wherein we have conditioned our minds to such wrong notions over time with the meaning of success and failure that peace has decided to take an about turn and reside just in the stars mocking from above. As a society we have failed again and this will not be the last... Again that's the tragedy and a comedy both!!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anita SabatJune 17, 2020 at 1:31 AM

    Agree with your points. You have shared your personal experience and thoughts too. Glad when people choose life.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more