Written jointly with Prapancha Boruah

Albert Camus once said rightly ,”There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide". Death of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput who died untimely of asphyxia due to hanging and took that decision after a tough six month of depression raised a lot of question about the his real motif behind such unexpected step taken by the most brilliant of the Bollywood actors. Unnatural death of the talented actress Sridevi jerked us to tears only a few months earlier. The talented Irfan Khan’s immature death also came as a shock. But the death of Sushant breeds conjectures because love triangles are coupled with. Bollywood conspiracies that finally led to the tragedy and mishap. Still the questions are on many a lip in India and abroad why Sushant killed Sushant or else why he was forced to kill himself ? These two are now the billion dollar questions. Sushant Singh Rajput wanted to help train women in self-defense, teach children how to dance, and own a Lamborghini. After his death on Sunday, old photos of his handwritten list of 50 dreams have surfaced online. The list consists of “dreams” like learning to fly a plane, playing a cricket match left-handed, travelling through Europe by train, sending 100 kids for workshops in ISRO/NASA, learning at least 10 dance forms and owning a Lamborghini. In a word he was a philanthropist cum genius and like Nasiruddin Irfan Amitabh or Shahrukh Khan or Shabana Azmi in filmdom or Arundhati Roy or Maheshweta Devi from the creative world of sociological literature for the marginalized , Shuhant too had in him the zeal of a social activist.

Again, his love with Ankita is a mystery. Did he ditch her or she ditched him, not much clear. Who ditched whom. Ankita did not get chance to attend his funeral because of the limit imposed on the number of mourners in the Corona atmosphere. Question is deeper because she was his fiancée and she was not accommodated in 15 people. His girlfriend Rhea gave long statements. What exactly was the equation and chemistry here that too is a wild conjecture.

The famous actors and actresses of Bollywood and Tollywood have opened their mouth. Still, nobody is sure what exactly happened to the ‘Raabta’ actor who hailed from Patna to rise to quick fame of a super star in Bollywood in so short time. Sushant Singh Rajput did not leave any suicide note at his residence but advocate Sudhir Kumar Ojha of Muzaffarpur alleged that these eight persons forced Sushant to commit suicide under a conspiracy which, he pleaded, amounted to murder. Others named in the complaint are Aditya Chopra, Sajid Nadiadwala, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Bhushan Kumar, Ekta Kapoor, and director Dinesh ,who according to Ojha ,did not let Sushant’s movies get released under a conspiracy and the late actor was not even invited to film functions because of these people. The complaint had been filed under Sections 306, 109, 504 and 506 and Bollywood actor Kangana Ranawat had been listed as a witness in the case. ast onscreen was Nitesh Tiwari directed ‘Chhichhore’. The 2019 release was a huge hit at the box office and featured Shraddha Kapoor as the leading lady. High conjectures are going on side by side if the death was due to the cause of depression. Even if the allegations are not true , it is clear Sushant was depressed .

This is a tragedy inexplicable always when an artist or poet or film superstar dies. On August 28, the Los Angeles County coroner made an official statement classifying that Jackson's death was a homicide. The coroner stated that Jackson died from the combination of drugs in his body, with the most significant drugs being the anesthetic propofol and the anxiolytic lorazepam. No superstar singer can be as famous globally as Michael Jackson. But he too had to succumb to tragic death. Sylvia Plath also told before her suicide note “I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb”. Her diaries and poems suggest she was neurotic, never being able to come to terms with reality. Her love for her husband Ted Hughes and equal repulsion for his adulterous ways and the despair at her own literary shortcomings.. Plath, at the cusp of fame, gassed herself in her kitchen .Virginia Woolf belonged to the upper crust — by birth and upbringing. But beneath the razor-sharp mind lay a bedrock of insecurities and neuroses. These worsened with the death of her mother when she was 13, half-sister at 15 and father 22. Not just the loss of loved ones, sexual abuse by step-brothers also scarred her emotionally. Hers was a dysfunctional family. Throughout her life she suffered and finally she filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the Ouse river. Arthur Koestler too committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. One of the world’s foremost anti-communist intellectuals, Koestler did not want to become an invalid in old age as he was suffering from Parkinson’s and cancer.

Kurt Vonnegut once told ‘Suicide is the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers”:Mayakovsky , the poster boy of the Bolshevik revolution, the enfant terrible of Russian literature, redefined the role of the poet in society. His poetry was anguished; he wanted to break the shackles of tradition. In “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”, he wrote, “Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity....” He supported the Reds, but became disillusioned with Stalinist bureaucracy. And the only way out was to take his own life. It was unthinkable that a writer like Ernest Hemingway who loved boxing, bullfights, sailing and hunting put the barrel of his shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His fans were shocked. Did the writer who embodied machismo take the coward’s way out? Was the macho image just a mask for a host of insecurities? Yukio Mishima the Japanese novelist of the last century, surely the best stylist. Of the genre was plagued by contradictions — sexual, social and political — his later works are full of blood and death. He had planned his death for over a year, finishing his last novel and getting his finances in order. He committed seppuku (disembowelment), the traditional Japanese method of suicide.

Maxim Gorky was shocked to get the news of death of the great lyrical poet Sergei Esenin, by his own hand, in a St Petersburg hotel on a dreary December day in 1925. Apparently, the poet’s pen had run dry. He slit his own vein, dipped his pen in the blood, and left his own epitaph in these luminously beautiful lines.

“Well then, my friends, well, well…..
I have seen you, and I have seen the
earth….
And your funereal trembling
I shall take as a last caress.”

The strange thing about Shushant is that his girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty started dating with him a year and a half back. In fact speculations were rife that the two were going to get married in November this year and in an interview with Sushant’s cousin in the India TV news channel was broadcasting this probable news of the actor’ wedding. However that time no name was mentioned. Now after the cremation, Rhea Chakraborty and Mahesh Shetty have been interrogated to get clear reasons why Sushant was suffering from depression for the last few months although he had no financial problems because of the lockdown. It is not so easy explaining that such a robust superstar with positive views took recourse to suicide simply because he did not get his films released or for being denied to sign for a new film or for not being invited to any film festival. Whatever may be the case , the depression of the creative people is now a burning topic everywhere. Shushant the living legend is now more a celebrity after his suicide because people loved him. Shelley probably wrote so truly,’ Those whom gods love die young’.