Warning: If you’re under 25, don’t read this.
If Nargis was alive today, she would have been 86. But she died shockingly young, at just 52. Long before then, she had set Bombay’s screens ablaze, and won an armful of awards for Mother India at age 28, where she acted next to Sunil Dutt.
She married him after a year, and for all practical purposes, dropped out of the film industry, leaving a legend in her wake: a 2011 opinion poll selected her as the greatest (Indian) actress of all time. She chose motherhood, charitable causes, like the Spastics Society of India, theatre, the arts and so on, before she passed at a shockingly young age.
On October 13, 1965, the British rock band, The Who, recorded one of their seminal albums, called “My Generation”. Every line in the eponymous song is followed by the riff, “Talkin’ ‘bout my geneeeraation.” But the most striking line is, “I hope I die before I get old.”
And there lies the rub. Heroes – cultural, poetic, political, academic – assume rockstar status if they die young. This is a morbid thought, but deserves some reflection. To keep matters simple, let’s restrict our list to approximately the age Nargis died – 52 – and list some names which resonate long after their premature passing.
Youthful Mortality
Unsurprisingly, out of a random list of 20-odd that I drew up from memory, and not any scientific methodology, the youthful mortality rate of musicians is highest: nearly 50% of the total.
It includes Kurt Cobain of Nirvana (died, age 27), Jimi Hendrix (28), Paul Chambers, the great bassist with both Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck (33), Charlie Parker, probably the greatest jazz musician who ever lived (34), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose genius is unchallenged (35), the great bassist of Weather Report Jaco Pastorius (also 35), reggae superstar Bob Marley (36), Elvis Presley (42), our own U (Mandolin) Shrinivas (45) and Michael Jackson (51).
In my random list, poets, writers and mathematicians who die early also become legends. Srinivasa Ramanujan was undoubtedly a great mathematician, but his legend was amplified by the fact he died, 32. Dylan Thomas, one of the greatest modern poets writing in the English language, passed at 39.
As a Bong, I can’t help mention Henry Vivian Louis Derozio, poet, academic, rebel against ossified traditions, who died at the incredibly young age of 22, when most kids today are undergraduates.
Kaliprasanna Ghosh, who translated the epics into Bangla, and wrote the unsurpassable satire that explored colonial Calcutta’s underbelly, Hutom Pechar Noksha, was gone before 40. Michael Madhudhan Dutt, who abhorred Bangla-Sanskrit literature early, before changing his mind and writing his Bangla classic Meghnad Badh Kabya, passed at 49.
The Cult Cut
In my unscientific list, there are four politicians who make the cult cut: John F Kennedy, killed, age 46 and still the subject of endless conspiracy literature and biopics from directors of the calibre of Oliver Stone.
But even he is overwhelmed by the Argentine-born pan-Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, murdered by a Bolivian dictatorship, age 39. As a teenager, I had a Che T-shirt, with his handsome, bearded, bereted face on it. I’m strangely happy that my son was gifted a similar shirt and wears it.
Not too many of us will acknowledge this, but Benazir Bhutto might someday become a T-shirt icon, killed at 51. And for all of us, in our mid-40s, Rajiv Gandhi continues to remain the handsome, if too idealistic, guy who wooed the world and made us all jealous because all the girls ogled him when he was alive. It didn’t last long: he perished, age 47.
This began with Nargis, the film star, so here are the icons who died young: Marilyn Monroe (36) and James Dean (shockingly young at 24). But here is a thought I want to leave us all with.
Europe debates its great literary savants: Cervantes, Hugo, Shakespeare. Of all three, the last was the most prodigious: it’s not for nothing he’s called The Bard. And he died, after producing all that work — plays, poems, sonnets — at 52, exactly the time Nargis had on Earth.
The Geriatrics
Meanwhile, the guys who hoped to die before they got old, are on tour: two of the original four are gone. But Pete Townshend, the guitar-smashing star and his vocal partner Roger Daltrey, carry on. They’re 70 and 71, respectively. You have to respect their longevity, like you think of what’s left of the geriatric Rolling Stones.
The marketing game to keep squeezing cash out of geriatric ‘legends’ is hot. But true genius lives forever, even if it dies young.
(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist)
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