Losing a friend to life

This isn't about Sushant Singh Rajput's death. Everyday many go through the same trauma and their deaths don't leave us so shocked. When a celebrity dies it's a big shock because we end up associating a life of success and riches with them and to us that is every reason to have a happy life. That's how we are conditioned. When it's just the contrary. Artists in general are the more vulnerable lot. With a life of excesses and excessive highs and lows, a constant need to feed the vanity, the million insecurities that come with being a public figure and a bubble a life like that creates, it's not easy. And to top it all we are well aware that it's not the talent that gets to anywhere, it's the hustle. The constant networking needed to stay "alive" in the eyes of others, lest they forget considering the short attention span of industry people. 

All in all it's hard work and it doesn't help that the ever scheming ever manipulating lives that make up this industry are trying to rush you through it all. Perhaps, it's true for any industry, but the element of being larger than life, of selling an idea of a celebrity to people, and of having constantly to live up to it cannot be easy. We never usually speak of it because we associate with those on screens as successful individuals, but what this industry of films and television is constantly doing to people by either reducing them to an idea and then constantly feeding their egos to keep them going and never truly telling them otherwise or just telling them the truth. For example, 'that you sucked', or 'your film sucked'. What will be told instead, 'people don't know what they want, it's this, it's that, the director fucked up, the critc is an ass, so on and so forth'. 

The very basic of life somehow escapes us, all of us, that ups and downs are a part of it. If you are bound to go up, you are bound to come down as well. The higher to go, the lower you fall, so striking a balance is the key. Knowing it is the first step. How can we constantly prepare our kids for these version of success but be appalled when they fail or worst treat them so bad if they make a bad decision. Who in their sane mind cannot know that sometimes the risk pays and sometimes it doesn't, sometimes you pass and sometimes you fail and sometimes you are happy and sometimes sad. But it's the unwitting pressure that we create and worst of all on our young. We are constantly setting these unreal ideals of success for ourselves and our kids. We don't tell them that if you grow up to be a loving, kind individual who respects other beings then you are successful. Instead we will tell them, getting your own place, a bank balance, a car, a good job is important. Now well for some of us it's important to work in order to put food on the table, but when can we know that it's enough? It never is. 

There is some sort of embarrassment associated with not 'making it'. I for my part have felt it. Having failed miserably in taking some important decisions for myself and gambling away mostly everything, I never once stopped to acknowledge how I really felt about it. 'How could I fail? How could I go through this? After all, I topped my school etc etc.' These thoughts would constantly surface because I was conditioned so but I would ignore them because I didn't want to feel dejected. I wanted to carry on as if it was ok and internally I wasn't. I guess ignoring how I felt and not facing it I let it pile on me for years.

The same thing a friend told me yesterday. 'How could I end up where I am? I was the smart one in school and college and the not so smart ones are doing better than me?' What a totally fucked up way of looking at life that is! This is what we teach our youth about life. And this is how judgemental our education system truly is. It is this unreal back breaking pressure building factory where if you fail 'you are marked in red'. How do you expect to generate an emotionally healthy individual from a process like this. And in general why is emotional health treated like an afterthought? When in all fairness you cannot expect your child to be healthy if she is not emotionally so. And yet we pile on these unreality of our lives (from which we have learnt nothing) on to our children because no one gives us space to reflect and we don't know how to ask for it, or what that even means.

I decided to leave Bombay few years back after being overwhelmed by the anxiety riddled industry

who felt if this or that didn't get produced the world would end. And frankly I couldn't buy into the nonsense of it all. One show or film does not matter to anyone except those in it. But I guess when obscene amounts of money are determining your time, you cannot look past it. It will add pressure to anybody and then that pressure is passed down the hierarchy of people involved to ensure that what needs to be done is done, thus rendering mostly the entire crew ineffective where you end up with a bad product which then you try to sell as good. And over and over again our success stories appear on television dancing to the tunes of our hearts and setting unreal standards of achievements for us. Why does no one talk about the darkness that permeates our film and television industry? Why are we constantly elated with their performances in this or that when let's admit most of them are shitty human beings without the basic decency to treat another person kindly. 

This is not to pass harsh judgements on anyone. But to say that our priorities need severe reassessments. We are all a part and parcel of the ways that define our system. I for my part could have saved myself a whole lot of drama, had I known that it is ok to feel so raw, so naked and without an answer. If I hadn't spoken to my friends I would have never known about the lows of their lives and how they dealt with it. And surprisingly most people deal with it well. I for one strongly believe that humans are inherently quite resilient as a species. But only if we can just be as ok about our lows as we are about our highs. If we can just talk openly to each other free from any inhibitions and pretences of having it together.  So this is not about Sushant Singh Rajput's death. Or may be it is.