Death of a Star!

[When I was flipping through my Diary 2002 the other day, my jottings about Monal’s tragic end beckoned me and brought to my mind a host of awesome nostalgic thoughts. I had a feeling of déjà vu as the dead artist again touched a chord in my heart. How would emotionally deplete artists behave when driven to wall? [Read on…]

Monal, a starlet from Bollywood, hung herself to death on the Tamil New Year’s Day. A strange quirk of fate played havoc with her life, putting off her promising career of becoming an icon in the Kollywood. TV visuals showed her sleeping eternally on a bier; she was a feast to flies that were swarming her lissome body … a body that set fire to the hearts of thousands of her fans.

Monal’s premature death moved me to a great extent not because she was one of the upcoming actors of the Kollywood and a diva for whom the tinsel world plumped rather madly, but because it set me thinking as to what led the young actor to kill herself savagely in the middle of her blooming career.

Sadly, the history of Kollywood has been replete with gory incidents of suicides committed by droves of actresses both upcoming and established. Vijayashree, Lakshmishree, Shoba and Jeyalkshmi are a few glaring examples. Mostly, the reasons that drive the artists to put out their lies are not fully investigated, and, as such reasons for their death remain buried with the stars.

Dire poverty, terminal illness, heavy monetary constraints, dowry harassment and incompatible with one’s spouse are mostly cited as reasons for men/women to commit suicide. However, those reasons cannot be attributed to an actor’s suicide. For, the stars have access to all the fine things of life: a cozy bungalow; a fleet of imported cars; a retinue of servants; and above all their basking in the limelight of the public glare.

However, it is still puzzling to know as why the actors, especially the budding ones go for the noose. Reasons, if analyzed, may go beyond their material well-being. Notwithstanding their wealth and popularity, the female actors are not a happy lot. Depressed as they are over some inexplicable reasons, they have some hard feeling always tugging at their hearts.

Having no intrinsic worth of histrionic skills but having only bewitching body lines, the junior actors soon find themselves surrounded by competition from other more bewitching chicks brought from other states. While being in the grip of insecurity of not getting chances, which constantly stare at them, the budding doll’s life become more untenable since their parents exhort them to go the whole hog with the men dominated filmdom, grab every straw coming in their way and make money.

Getting no warmth and real affection from parents who treat them only as money churning machines, the up-coming film girls start feeling lonely with no one around them to repair their breaking hearts and assuage their hard feelings. Again, falling in love with persons of their choice bring only holocaust to their homes and make the parents to stoop to any level to cut their love knots, fearing such love affairs would dry up the money channels.

Unfortunately, the girls on the move never share their feelings and thoughts even with their close confidants. While there are thousands of fans who are building temples for them and worshipping them as ‘maiden goddesses’, the actors have no one close to them to give emotional comfort and support. Emotional depletion and injured feelings thus play ghost in their minds. When such pent-up feelings go off bounds, the beleaguered actors suddenly flicker off their lives and create flutters in the film world.

Early psychiatric intervention to address the emotional problems of the actors can prevent disasters and deaths, says a doctor. “Suicide, the doctor adds, is certainly preventable and it is important that young people learn to cope with stress, learn alternative methods of dealing with emotional crisis and practice new techniques to solve problems.”

Now, the air is thick with the Film Employees Federation of South India is planning to give counseling to the actors to make them aware of the necessity for giving vent to their hard feelings and getting back their repose. Such damage control steps, though made with good intention, would fall through since no actor worth her name would showcase their feelings to the public view. A better and pragmatic step would be giving counseling to the parents of the actors to make them more pliable in handling their sensitive, and emotionally charged star daughters who are in a mad race to pitch in for space in the celluloid world.

Image courtesy: Google

Queen of Blah … Blah

 “Why did you absent yourself for days on end? You vanish into thin air when I need you most,” Nanda, my wife, glowered at Kala, our housemaid, who, after days of disappearance, presented herself suddenly at our door one day. She stood there with her head bent, not able to look at Nanda’s face. Kala was in her mid-5os, as thin as wire. She wore a cheap weave with her hair in a knot no larger than a walnut.

 “Come on; tell me Kala, why you frequently disappear from the work? Don’t you get paid for your chores,” Nanda snarled at Kala, her tone tinged with anger and rage.

 “Believe me, Amma,” Kala spoke in a cringing tone - she was still looking at the ground beneath her feet. “A black scorpion stung me yesterday. I was rushed to a hospital where I got my navel jabbed with twenty-four injections”

I stood disoriented with my senses taking leave of me. But Kala continued her bleating.

 “Yes, Amma, the scorpion was inside the kerosene stove. When I started cleaning the burner, the bloody thing stung my wrist.” Kala’s voice trailed off when Nanda started laughing heartily. She too laughed. Taking advantage of my wife’s jovial mood, the trickster entered the house and started doing her chores in her usual slapdash way.

Unlike in other towns where we had lived in for years, home maids are rare species to be found in Chennai metro. Two things are elusive in this conservative place: functional auto meters in auto-rickshaws and the services of maids

Since the tribes of maids thus dwindle here due to their not following the ‘ Varnashrama Dharma, they are in great demand.  They hike their wages to roof tops, would never touch leftover food, insist a cup of ‘BRU-instant’ both morning and evening. They are annoyingly rigid doing only allotted works, and for any extra chore they would demand monetary compensation. However, Nanda treat her maid a ‘Royal Queen’ giving her money whenever she demands and provide her with best food she cook for our family- I know Kala is a gourmet. But then,  what is more disgusting to us is not my maid’s frequent vanishing when the house is full of guests, but the reasons she adduces to justify her sudden absence.

 Kala has the ability to craft fine stories. It seems she has been immensely endowed with the power of creative imagination, which she skillfully uses to rob our senses. In the ocean of her imagination, the scorpion story is only a trifle. The followings are some of her excuses she would be fishing out to justify her sudden disappearance: death of a grandma followed by a grandfather [she had almost virtually killed all her lineage]; rain flooded her house and washed away her possessions [she would say this when the city is reeling under hot summer]; one of her children has swallowed the vegetable knife; another boy had brain tumor but got cured in three days when she gave him some herbal powder. Kala’s power of the Gab always reminds me on Rashid, the master story-teller, in one of Salman Rushdie’s short stories.

 Recently, Kala had vanished from my house for a fortnight. When we were looking for another maid, she came running to Nanda one day. She looked devastated with hair disheveled, eyes shedding streams of tears. She took hold of Nanda’s hands, pressed them against her forehead and started crying. I was perplexed, but she didn’t allow my wife to speak. Wiping her tears with her hands and blowing her nose at the free end of her sari she said: “Amma, why the gods choose to be so cruel to me? You know, my daughter-in-law was in the family way. Ayyo! Amma! She died ten days back while giving birth to a child. She was too young to die. I don’t know what sins I had committed to incur such a wrath of god.” She paused only to start crying again. I was greatly moved and my eyes too were welled- up with tears.

It took helluva time for Nanda to console the grief-stricken Kala. Swept by emotions, I asked Nanda to allow her resume work. A month went on and the cat has finally come out of the hat. When I learned that Kala has no daughter-in-law, and his only son is studying in 4^th Std in a corporation school, I was flabbergasted. I went ballistic not with Kala, but only with Nanda for being so naïve and novice to allow a maid to rob our emotions. As was our wont, we did allow Kala to carry on her work at home though we know that our maid was having her last laugh at our helplessness.

 All said and done, Kala is the ‘Queen of Blah … Blah’, an outstanding ‘Juggler of Stories’ whose power of the gab combined with her histrionic skills would always give credence to her ‘volley of lies’.

 Image courtesy: Google