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.

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