Sushant Singh Rajput and The Blame Game

In the rush to find someone to blame for Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide, we have overlooked the most obvious culprit: Sushant Singh Rajput himself.

The 34-year-old actor was found hanging in his Bandra apartment on Sunday, June 14th, a terrible ending to a bright young life and a promising future. As difficult as it is to imagine, I ask that you consider all the decisions one has to make when they take the drastic step of ending their own life. How will they do it? When will they do it? Who will they reach out to before they go? Will they leave a note? Is it even worth it? When you commit suicide, your mind--even in a state of abject illness--is constantly moving, taking all these things into consideration before the act is completed. And at every turn, you have a chance to back out, a chance to correct course and decide your life is worth living after all. The ultimate outcome is the culmination of hundreds of choices, big and small, that only make sense in the mind of the person making them. And when those choices result in death, it is perhaps the last act of earthly control a person can commit to mitigate the immense pain of an unhappy life.

Suicide is a personal decision brought on by extreme mental illness. What suicide is not, is the fault of every person who ever slighted the dead, whether it was in their personal life, their professional life, or simply in their own imagination.

Singh with Anushka Sharma in PK

When the news broke of Sushant’s death, it seemed, for a brief moment, that the one positive thing to come from such a senseless tragedy would be an expansion of the discussion surrounding mental health; a topic that has long been ignored at best, and heavily stigmatized at worst. When a cancer patient dies, regardless of whether they chose to seek treatment or not, we do not call them weak for it. But because mental illness is a disease you cannot physically see as it breaks down a body, much less quantify the spread, we often vilify those who succumb to it. But the mentally ill are not weak, they are sick. And like all sick people, they are in need of medical care to get better. The fact that both the illness itself and the act of seeking help for it are looked down on by our society often prevents them from ever improving. And round and round the cycle goes.

No one knows what Sushant Singh Rajput was thinking in the last moments of his life. He deliberately chose not to tell us, forgoing the common practice of leaving a note to explain his decision. But those close to him seemed to recognize that he was in pain, and the call to check in with each other during these difficult times, and to treat each other with thoughtfulness, quickly rose. 

And then Karan Johar posted his condolences on Twitter, and just like that, empathy gave way to finger-pointing.

As a celebrity director, producer, and notorious gossip, Karan Johar certainly wields a significant amount of power within the industry. While he cannot force an audience to embrace you, he can certainly beat them over the head with your image, a talent he typically reserves for the sons and daughters of other powerful film families. His clique is as tightly closed off as it is star-studded, and if your last name is not Khan, Bachchan, Bhatt, or Kapoor, you will probably find yourself on the outside looking in. Johar is an admitted Bollywood elitist, almost as starstruck by his famous friends and their progeny as we are. His long-running celebrity talk show Koffee with Karan is fueled by sly digs and strong insinuations, generally harmless but optically a perfect representation of who Johar and his friends consider worth their attention, and who they feel comfortable ignoring. It’s the type of pettiness we all indulge in from the comfort of our own homes, only broadcast internationally so that the targets of such gossip have easy access to the things being said about them. And I imagine some of those jabs sting quite a bit.

Singh with Sara Ali Khan in Kedarnath

But Karan Johar is only a flawed man, not a monster. He deals in whispers and PR moves and countermoves, but he’s also keenly aware of the business advantages that come with promoting star kids. As Johar himself so candidly wrote in an article on the subject, “We are businesses with bottom lines and budgets. And tomorrow if I want to launch Shah Rukh Khan’s son because he’s Shah Rukh Khan’s son and I believe I can gain from it, why won’t I?” The message is clear: Johar is running a production house, not a charity, and he is entitled to give his money and his platform to whomever he pleases.

Sushant Singh Rajput did not hail from a film dynasty. He was born in Bihar, the son of a government employee. Despite a strong academic record that included the title of National Olympiad Winner in Physics, he left school to pursue the notoriously insulated and unreliable profession of acting.

Here is what everyone seems to be forgetting: in an industry where almost no one succeeds, Sushant Singh Rajput defied the odds and, by 34, had built an extremely successful acting career. Like Shah Rukh Khan before him, he was an outsider who made the transition from a successful career in television to a burgeoning film career. His last theatrical release, Chhichhore, collected over 215 cr at the box office. He may not have been part of Karan Johar’s inner circle, but he was a bona fide success story for any actor unconnected to the industry to look to for hope and encouragement. Sushant was attractive, wealthy, and on the brink of another high-profile release with the Hindi remake of The Fault in Our Stars...and he was also very unhappy.

Within hours of his death, his unhappiness became the fault of Karan Johar, Alia Bhatt, Sonam Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha, and every other industry insider who had the good fortune of being born to the right family. After just a few tweets and Instagram posts, the same people who preached kindness and understanding toward one another found it appropriate to lay his death on Karan Johar’s doorstep. When Alia Bhatt expressed shock at his demise, clips of her debut appearance on Koffee with Karan that showed her “killing” Sushant in the popular parlour game “Hookup, Marry, Kill” began circulating, and her feelings (the same ones we were all expressing) were automatically negated. When Sonam and Sonakshi rightfully pointed out that blindly blaming people in Sushant’s orbit for causing his death was an undeserved cruelty, the internet descended upon them with mockery of everything from their films to their appearance to their personal lives. Apparently, nepotism renders you impervious to mental illness, and public derision can only push you over the edge if you came from the wrong side of the tracks.

Chhichhore was a blockbuster

The hypocrisy of the last few days has been blinding. The same industry that lauded Deepika Padukone so generously for being open about her struggle with depression felt comfortable turning Sushant’s death into a platform for the long worn-out debate on nepotism. His life, instead of being celebrated as a combination of talent and intelligence that ended far too soon, was boiled down to one word: “outsider”. He was ostracized even in death, by people who had the nerve to question why he felt so alone.

We will never know if the right person reaching out at the right moment would have saved Sushant Singh Rajput’s life. That is one of the questions that can only be answered by a man who is no longer with us. What we do know is that, like so many others, Sushant suffered from mental illness, a sickness in his mind that led him to make a series of decisions that resulted in his death. We’ve taken his last act of personal agency and called his death a murder, while social media has morphed into a thundering mob beating at the door of every person in the industry who wasn’t as kind to Sushant as they could have been. In our demand for greater empathy, we seem to have abandoned our reserve of it, while the international conversation no longer places Sushant at the center of his own life and death. Does anybody really believe this is what he would have wanted? And does it matter, since he purposely chose not to tell us?

We will never know why Sushant did what he did, a maddening fact that we nevertheless must live with. But this was not a murder, and to call it one squanders a very powerful opportunity to create an environment where open discussions about mental health are prioritized. Because ultimately, the only person who can decide to seek and accept help is the one who is suffering. I know it’s difficult to hear, but if you’re looking for the person responsible for Sushant’s death, god bless his soul, then you already have your answer. 

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