Rage and outrage

Manpriya Singh

Metaphorically speaking, in the past couple of days Bollywood has been called more names than the movies it has made¬¬ – a club, a cartel, a casino, a circus. Amidst the blame-game, fault-finding and pin-pointing (with or without names), we un-mute some noises (right or wrong) being made after we lost Sushant Singh Rajput.

The tee point

Be it the debate over social alienation or isolation, the one who has found himself at the focal point is Karan Johar, and it started with his self-reflective post that talks what he could have done, but didn’t do. “Sushant’s unfortunate demise has been a huge wake-up call to me, to my level of compassion and my ability to foster and protect my equations.”

But the tweets, trolls and those from the fraternity haven’t been kind ever since. Many posts have put the spotlight on the shallowness of expressing grief over 140 characters. Like the one by actor Nikhil Dwivedi, “At times, our movie industry’s hypocrisy gets to me. The high and mighty announcing they should’ve kept in touch with Sushant. C’mon, you didn’t and that’s because his career dipped. Are you in touch with Imran Khan or Abhay Deol and others? No, but you were when they were doing well.”

Such is the obviousness of the issue that even the most oblique one-sentence tweets are quite self-explanatory. Especially director Anubhav Sinha, who wrote, “The Bollywood Privilege Club must sit down and think hard tonight.”

Where does the buck stop?

Does the fault lie with the industry, the society or the social media? That’s for another day. Not for Sonam Kapoor though, who tweeted, “Blaming a girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, family and colleagues for someone’s death is ignorant and mean-spirited.” Meanwhile, Kangana Ranaut in a charged-up interview said, “It’s nothing but a planned murder.”

What we clearly don’t want is another Sushant episode, unfortunately Koena Mitra, while slamming Bollywood, said, “You can never know what others are going through. Their struggles, pains, desires. Kindly stop mocking, bullying…Kindly be kind to all.” A message in sync with Sikander Kher’s super-emotional video he released the evening of Sushant’s demise, where he admits to being lonely and being judged.

Those on the same page

Politician Sanjay Nirupam’s tweet insinuating the inner workings of the film industry, and stating how Sushant may have lost seven projects in the past six months, connects the dots with what director Shekhar Kapur wrote about being in the know about the pain the actor was going through.

“I knew the story of the people who let you down so bad that you would weep on my shoulder…What happened to you was their karma. Not yours.” The very evening of the unfortunate incident, Ranvir Shorey took no names but spared nobody, when he posted a series of tweets, talking about the, “Coterie that owns the only high stakes table in the casino will never be questioned.”

The actor continued, “Something has to be said about the games they play and their two-facedness. Something has to be said about the power they derive from having inherited privilege.”

Ripple effect

A Facebook post by Abhinav Kashyap, which might not have gone down well with Anurag Kashyap, read: “To others who are asking why I have not taken names of others in the Bandra cartel…I have no grudges against anyone except the Khans… Yes, I will never commit suicide but should anything untoward happen to me, by now the country knows who to blame.”

Sonakshi Sinha’s opinion on the matter is what many an Indian mother must have told their kids: “The problem with wrestling with pigs is that you get dirty and the pig enjoys it. To certain people trying to garner publicity and highlight their issues using the death of a member…please just stop.”