Pratyusha Banerjee is being made out to be a thin-skinned girl who crumbled under the weight of a faulty relationship. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Rahul Raj Singh, has been labelled as somewhat of a Dracula by the deceased actor’s so-called friends.
Read: “Pratyusha Can’t Commit Suicide”, Say Her Close Pals in Industry
Mumbai Mirror has rightly pointed out the dramatic manner in which these industry somebodies have been calling press conference after press conference, hurling mostly unfounded accusations against Singh. One Bigg Boss “celebrity”, Ajaz Khan, has even proclaimed, “This (Pratyusha’s suicide) is murder. We have to get to the bottom of this.”
Now, suicide is an unnatural and abrupt end to a life. Every suicide confounds us, and to put an end to the discomfort around this voluntary and violent act of taking one’s own life, we analyse it... we analyse it some more, and keep on analysing it till we arrive at a figure who can be somewhat blamed for it.
For instance, last year, when my 28-year-old neighbour committed suicide, in hushed tones the whole mohalla began to surmise that somehow, parental pressure had taken his life. There was no suicide note, and in fact, their son, who had been suffering from depression, had called his parents in his last moments saying he had made a mistake, eaten rat poison and had asked them to come home soon. And yet, for the others, it was easier to hold the unassuming parents guilty, than to think it could have been an impulsive decision taken by a depressed person.
Read: RainbowMan: It’s Not Easy To Kill Yourself. I’ve Been There.
Abetment to Suicide: What Exactly Does it Imply?
As one article rightly points out, while most suicides are committed because of some form of mental illness, they are “nonetheless the decision of an individual”. So at what point must one be blamed for abetting another person’s suicide? When does an argument, or a bilious lover’s tiff, become an abetment to suicide?
Even if Rahul Raj Gupta was a horrible partner to Pratyusha, are we accurate in labelling him a “murderer”, as implied from Ajaz Khan’s statements? What would be a more apt label for him, then? A jerk, or maybe an a**hole?
Survivors Guilt
Perhaps Ajaz isn’t to be blamed for alleging Gupta as Pratyusha’s murderer. While mourning the loss of a loved one to suicide, the intimate family and friends of the victim go through additional challenges – encountering emotions like shame, guilt, and a preoccupation with understanding why the death occurred, as mentioned in Harvard Health.
And the absence of a suicide note only makes the questions more tedious – people end up blaming each other for having driven the victim to take their life.
Suicides: No Pattern Game
Wrongly attributed reasons or patterns also add to the complexities of understanding suicides. In his sharp, analytical article, Everybody loves farm suicides, Swaminathan Aiyer wrote that even though farmer suicides had “limited correlation with financial stress, and most correlation with psychological and genetic problems”, no journalist would come forward and adhere to this theory for they will cease to win awards for their reportage on farmer suicides. Borrowing the same logic, though a celebrity suicide is made to be yet another reminder of the monstrous world of glamour, in reality, not all of them can be clubbed as a bitter occupational menace. Each suicide is different. Each has its own separate reasons.
Data shows that in 2014, men actually committed more suicides than women, 67.7 % as opposed to 32.3 % in women. And that as many as 69.7 percent of those who ended their life had an annual income of less than Rs 1 lakh. The data also went on to show that suicides didn’t occur to a certain type of people — it had taken lives of the young and old, of housewives and of married men. So we can’t say suicides as more likely to happen in tinsel town. Working men, housewives and people in rural areas are as vulnerable.
Two-Minute Silence for the Small Town Starlet Cliche
Also, by labeling the Pratyusha suicide as a “small-town actor’s issue”, we are inevitably cutting all small-town ambitious people’s ambitions down to size, saying, “Arrey, you guys can’t handle the pressure of Bombay”.
Read: In Pics: Remembering Pratyusha, Our Favourite Balika Vadhu
Actually, we can’t label it a glamour world issue at all. By citing examples of Mauritian-Indian model Viveka Babajee, or Bangalore-born Nafisa Joseph in the same breath as that of Pratyusha’s suicide, we can’t label an entire industry as either more, or less prone to suicidal tendencies. No matter what these Page 3 glossies would have us believe.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)