Sushant Singh Rajput: The cursed prodigal son of fate

In the opening scene of one of Sushant Singh Rajput’s greatest films, titled Sonchiriya, a band of dacoits is walking through the Chambal valley. The gang comes to a halt as someone spots a dead snake ahead. But its leader Malkhan Singh, essayed by the magical Manoj Bajpai, presses ahead and removes the carcass with the bayonet of his gun from the serrated path.

“Invoke the name of the goddess and move on,” he tells the bandits.

“Dadda,” argues Sushant, “a dead snake can curse us.”

Replies Bajpai: “A curse won’t go away even if you change the path.”

If Sushant were alive today, he would have agreed. There was, most likely, a curse on his life that he just couldn’t evade.

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A curse is something life does to harm you even if you want to evade it. You are, in most cases, helpless against its tyranny. In Sushant’s case, the curse grew and multiplied in his mind, turning into severe depression.

If life had given Sushant a few more hours to think before he hanged himself, he would have realised that committing suicide is not even an option—it is just a momentary quirk not many, unfortunately, get the chance to regret once that temptation recedes.

Sushant, who died on June 14 at his Bandra residence at the unviable dieable age of 34–as Arundhati Roy said in a different context in her most famous book—was intellectually too sharp to know that the purpose of life is to extend it for as long as long possible; and that free will means not succumbing to the lure of death. It’s a tragedy that he relented to a temptation that defied his own intellectual depth because, in all likelihood, he was in the grip of a depression, a darkness that puts out every spark of hope and reason.

The purpose of life, as Covid-19 has taught us, to live, to defy death. You may have heard this phrase many times in the past, but it seems to mean more now since India’s Prime Minister rightly pointed out on prime-time TV: jaan hai to jahaan hai (the world exists only if you live).

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Sushant knew this more than anyone else, or so we believed. Why else would he have tested the limits of life, giving up easier options for a higher objective? If he had believed that life is about accepting what it gives you—an engineering degree in his case—why would he have rebooted it by starting out as a back-up dancer and then as an actor?  Why would he have gone through so much to get something more out of the life he already had as a wannabe engineer? Obviously, he valued life, knew that it was worth fighting for.

You could see Sushant’s passion for life in his journey—a Patna boy starting out as a back-up dancer and then making his way up the ladder without the beatific presence of a godfather. A Shahrukh Khan of sorts of the current decade, if you will. Only a hard-boiled fighter with a burning desire to succeed could have started– and carried on– with this gruelling journey.

And he appeared to be the intellectual sort—a mix of brains, cinematic smarts, a shy smile and plenty of words of wisdom on everything. Off screen, when he spoke, you could almost feel his brain whirring, words competing in his mind to express the depth of his persona in a way that made everyone sit up and listen. You could almost wager that he had read Margret Mitchell well enough to know the Scarlet O’ Hara philosophy of tomorrow being another day.

Over and above this, he seemed to have it made. There is an entire group of celebrities—called Club 27—that has died young in the West, either by choice or accidentally (Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison, et al). But, in the known history of Indian cinema, not many with Sushant’s credentials and CV—engineering student, Stanford scholarship winner, physics Olympiad medallist, great dancer, successful actor—have killed themselves. In fact, there are just two examples of stars dying at their peak—one of them Guru Dutt and the other Divya Bharti. But, both these cases are still open to interpretation. We still do not know if Guru Dutt died voluntarily or because of an accidental dose of sleeping pills taken with alcohol. Similarly, we do not know if Divya killed herself or fell accidentally off her balcony. So, Indian history seemed loaded against Sushant—an actor who seemed to be on the up escalator.

And yet he committed suicide.

Why do people kill themselves? The simplest answer is that they do not find life worth living. This happens when they run out of hope because of a variety of reasons—one of them clinical depression. In an ideal world, hope should have been an over-the-counter drug. Unfortunately, nobody has ever thought about it.

We may never find out why Sushant gave up hope. There are two possible theories, pending more evidence. One, like all intellectually sharp people, he may have realised life is nothing but a series of absurd events. But, if he were not dealing with clinical depression, Sushant would have also realised that the point of life is to deal with this absurdity, not to find a meaning in it. As philosopher Albert Camus, when asked if there is anything to be proud of life, argued, “Yes, there is: this sun, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape…I surrender nothing of myself…learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.”

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Two, and this is plain conjecture, he did it for a woman. Sensitive people, the ones who value emotions over material success, have their own ideas of happiness, success and failure—they generally seek emotional gratification over material success. And frequent failures can make them consider life a vacuous pursuit.

Writing for the Hindustan Times three years ago, Sushant had revealed that when he came to Delhi to study engineering, his first thought was:  “The stage is set for me to bump into the heroine. But where is the heroine?”

Maybe the quest for a heroine—and turning it into the purpose of life— was his curse. And, even though he changed his path many times, it just did not spare Sushant Singh Rajput.