Absence. Isolation. Suicide.

Not going to lie, I've stared at this empty page many-a-times thinking of a fresh start. But it always felt like looking backwards - and that's one thing I wouldn't want to do. Wow, and there it is - I wrote something - and now its in ink. It's been so long since anything appeared on this space, that I felt like the person who wrote all those things before is not going to write anything else. He's done. I'm the new guy and I don't care if you're actually interested in reading what I have to say. If I have to say.

Lately, I'm quite stuck pondering over Sushant Singh Rajput's suicide.

When it comes to his death, I don't want to point fingers. Why do we have this strange urge to always point fingers when shit happens? Whatever that shit is, people, media, relatives - everyone - just want to know who to go beat up, who to sue and who to vent their frustrations at. I don't understand this logic. When Ma died 2 years ago (yes, that happened) a lot of my family members wanted to point fingers. And it was quite easy to point fingers too - she did die because of medical negligence - or rather medical apathy - and the fear to do something out of the box, lest we lead a mob and murder them as many have done time and again in India. Yes, they can point fingers too. It didn't matter that we kept pushing them for 2 fucking months, they still wanted to tow the line and wait it out till she couldn't take it anymore and gave up on life, after significant torture and loneliness in the isolating ICU ward. We had legitimate reasons to point fingers at certain individuals, but it wouldn't have brought my sweet mum back, would it?

Pointing fingers at the KJos, Khans and YRFs out there and blame them for Sushant's suicide isn't going to bring him back either. I mean, is it really surprising that there's a nexus or a lobby or an invisible hand(s) that is at play in the film industry? It really shouldn't come as a surprise. We all know it, and it also makes sense for it to exist - Bollywood is an unregulated economy like no other because unlike me, most individuals in our country of a billion people prefer that mode of entertainment above others. It's a business and a good businessman always looks for ways to either control a newbie's rise or bring him/her down altogether. Maybe that's the story of Sushant Singh Rajput? They're also not bothered by the negative publicity either. If you look for a correlation between the profiles of people that are tweeting against these entities now and how many of them religiously watch the movies made by the same people, you're just giving Karl Pearson a chance to say "I positively told you so". Bollywood has gotten so big, that it defines India - in all its glorious and murky ways. India is henceforth both Masaan and Chennai Express.

We may never know what drove him to kill himself. Sushant had reportedly met many adversities in his life (and I'm admittedly being presumptuous here). But adversities arise in everyone's life. But is it ever enough to end oneself abruptly? Clinical depression and other states of mind definitely have a say in this, but if you believe in the right to euthanasia, then how different is suicide anyway? After all, for people who like to have a certain sense of control over their own lives and their body, should also be allowed to have control over their death which is an integral part of their lives and body. Making suicidal attempt a criminal offense is definitely not addressing the main issue here - which is the feeling of one's emotional state of mind hitting rock-bottom. We must try to understand this issue first, as its quite a complex issue.

So what drives people to suicide? Loss of the will to live. In that case, one must ask themselves, what does it mean to live? I'm sure at different stages of our lives, the reason to live keeps changing, so can't argue on that point much. But if we focus on the part that is constant, we must remember that human beings are social animals and the impact that social interaction has on us is evident from the isolation that has befallen all of us during the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. In India at least, the sense of community is really strong (almost to an extent that it's damaging). So when adversity hits, we look towards our people to support us, and that has its own problems of containment-related issues but we're not going to focus on that. When people are losing jobs left and right, one of the things they need is an assurance - even if its a false assurance, its a temporary respite from the emotional doldrums that that person is stuck in.

I'll be honest, it hit me hard as well. In many ways, life hasn't been very kind to me in the last two years and I felt like this was going to be the year when I finally bounce back up. I still can. But I've realized that 2020 isn't just going to be about me. When news of the global lock-downs and stay-at-home orders first hit the US east coast, I was pretty sick and I didn't know if I had the virus or not - I was fresh out of the Mardi Gras celebrations and that turned out to be a hot-bed for infectious community spread in New Orleans. I had to quarantine myself for as long as I didn't feel well and three more weeks - all the while, casualties kept going up. Two months into it, I was severely depressed and stressed about my financial security. I was even more stressed about my dad being alone in India, and the virus having hit my country and city pretty hard as well. I couldn't take it anymore and against all advice, I went running in the Audubon Park, taking all bodily precautions that I could. That was a pretty decent turn-around in my emotional state. Soon afterwards, I started calling people up - friends, that I haven't spoken to in a long time. Before you know it, we got our old college gang to get together, come online and play co-op computer games at designated times. Then we expanded to catching up with other friends (and their new families and kids). Irrespective of how life turned out differently for all of us, I was happy to see them after such a long time.

I have been hit with suicidal thoughts many times in life, I can confess that to you. But I have also been allowed opportunities by my peers and friends to get out of it. Many times, their simple actions have indirectly reminded me of the sacrifice that my mum (and dad) had to make and the trouble she had to go through to raise me and that it would be very wasteful and rather insulting to her memory if I throw it all away. But to keep the will to live is definitely not dependent on my mental health alone, because I can't be trusted to remember that always. I have thus heavily relied on my friends - and unbeknownst to them, I have used them - over time and again to help me out of such situations. People who know me, know that my friends are a big part of my life and I'm incredibly loyal to them.

But - and this is probably the last point I'll make in this long rant of mine (in the next 3 paragraphs) - the reason I connect with my friends is because we're like-minded. Because I do not feel confronted for my beliefs. I'm not being antagonized by them for thinking the way I think. I have made some amazing friends in science, probably because they fit my one and only criteria - that they be logical. While I generally get along well with almost anyone, I don't get along with people who indulge in fluff and talk of things with no substance. And it is crazy that our world is not only full of them, but this attitude itself is increasingly getting out of hand. More recently, I have even recognized a righteous antagonism towards science and logic among people. As if my practice of the scientific method itself is offensive to them and that I may be mocking them in some strange game of one-upmanship. People have started disbelieving scientific facts and lash out rather brutally when told the facts. I'm not asking people to suddenly become scientists. But one should realize the hypocrisy in going home after work, turning on the air conditioning, drinking cold water out of the fridge, increasing the volume on the tv only to say "NASA is a government conspiracy", "Indians made a proto-helicopter in the 15th century BC" and "vaccines cause autism". You can't be selective about science - you either believe it or you don't. If you don't, go live in the jungle by yourself, no clothes, no phones, no tools and no amenities of any kind.

Populist political leaders like PM Modi and President Trump have epitomized the hypocrisy. Modi, former tea-seller, does not want to consult the economists before announcing demonetization. Trump, businessman by profession, tells all Americans that he has a good feeling about hydroxychloroquine and its use against Covid-19. He probably didn't even read the transcript of the flawed study that first suggested for it to be used in the treatment of the disease. International deals between countries were made based on his word, and political points were won. Scientists kept shouting into deaf ears that the study is but based on implausible statistical backing and there's no way to reach similar conclusions as the authors of that opportunistic paper had reached. Worse, hydroxychloroquine turns out to have some serious cardio-toxicity and people have been known to die of sudden cardiac arrest after taking the medicine months ago.

As FDA finally puts a stop to the use of that drug in Covid-19 clinical trials, scientists do not just feel vindicated. They feel rather lost and upset about the fact that even during a crisis that required everyone to listen to the science, people didn't. I'm sure I feel pretty hopeless about our situation. Practicing science is pretty isolating work, considering that a bulk of the work is actually done inside our head. That leads to quite a busy, buzzing head - I definitely suffer from it, and it keeps me up at night. It becomes important to not do it sometimes and take my mind off things - and that's when I want to talk to my family, talk to my non-scientific friends, go out and get a drink, and meet new people. But with the deepening crisis of unscientific populism, its hard to connect with people and the world keeps getting more and more lonely.

Sushant Singh Rajput was a thinker at heart, as is evident from his social media posts, hobbies and published interviews. He used to read books on quantum physics between shooting scenes, stargaze on his professional telescope, and was apparently developing an app to empower women in some idea or form, an initiative that is now lost. So was he too smart for people around him? Was he judged, ridiculed and antagonized by peers for his esoteric philosophical quests? Did he feel lonely and isolated too? Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised.

ADDENDUM:

I have been told that suicide is a split-second decision - but I'm not talking about the act itself. I'm talking about the build-up of depression that forces a person to get to that point. I have known some people who have been through terrible phases in life, and the one thing they swear that has helped them is the (at-times involuntary) company they've got from friends and colleagues. The trend lately is quite reactionary - to label and categorize everything and everyone, and the rhetoric in every walk of life has become a kind of "us versus them". Even to counter arguments, we use antagonizing language - and while sometimes its necessary, the whole ordeal leaves a lot of us finding that the collateral attrition from the arguments is slowly weighing down on us.

Finally, it feels like I came back 4 years later to my blog only to rant.

Whatever.