spare no thought for young people Tunisha Sharma, as if her life had been a masquerade ball, a TV actor who chose the middle of the weekday to steel herself for the terrifyingly lonely decision to end her life in the make-up room. According to many reports on the matter, her love was unfulfilled. Driven to become the golden goose to her family, perhaps misunderstood as to who she really was. It was over in a matter of seconds, with none of her crew suspecting she had taken her extreme step.
Still, the mental isolation that may have led Sharma to take her own life is the least-discussed part of her death. . After all, the 20-year-old starlet must have more dangerous relationships than she does with actual working girls. Overnight, her friends in the industry and her family appropriated her life and analyzed what went wrong. Sharma’s mother accused her ex-boyfriend and co-star Shihsan Khan of being a villain, bringing the toxic political discourse of “love jihad” into the story. Hijacking the story, she claimed she had been mostly exploited and abused by her own family, claimed to be happy with her adoptive family, and played an audio clip in which Sharma testified to their generosity.
Now that the girl is gone, her death allows us to set a course for a national conversation by removing the need to question what everyone might have missed. Everyone seems to benefit from using it. Right-wingers can legitimize hate politics, media become fodder for primetime debates, and families get headlines on reality TV.
In many ways, Sharma’s case brings us back to the 2020 suicide of actor Sushant Singh Rajput. The case continues to be used to spin conspiracy theories, even though the AIIMS report denies murder. Despite his apparent success, the Rajput may have been broken inside, he had a history of depression, and although he was a “hero” in public perception, he was also fragile. easy to be hurt.
The Rajput’s suicide quickly became a murderous conspiracy involving the actor’s family, embezzled money, black magic, an allegedly exploitative live-in partner, political bigwigs, the Bollywood Mafia and nepotism, and insider-outsider controversy. developed into His tragedy was weaponized to solve problems between political parties, using his star-like aura. For Bihar’s Prime Minister Nitish Kumar, who suffered from severe image deficiencies, the exploited Child of the Earth case in remote Mumbai could not have been more opportune. aam Bihari sees his Sushant as his ‘hero’ so the actor was iconified as ‘the pride of Bihar’ but none of the politicians supporting his cause had anything to do with him It is known that As for his BJP in Maharashtra, that troll army played out an alleged relationship where his girlfriend Rea Chakraborty was with Aditya Thackeray, a descendant of Shiv Sena, with more evidence than evidence. I picked up the blemishes.
Another struggling actor in Bollywood like Sharma, Chakraborty, in one fell swoop, is a supposed femme fatale who drove the late actor into an addiction, tricked him and trapped him in a world of debt and drug cartels. did. She became a news story because the legal evidence and sobering facts about the actor’s death were too dry to squeeze out. As such, her imprisonment was made more visually satisfying as a portrait of immediate justice.
Like Khan and Sharma, both Rajputs and Chakraborti were appropriated as political instruments. When the BJP instigated the “Justice for Sushanth” campaign, parliament took up the “Justice for Leah” movement. The self-proclaimed activists chanted slogans against the “distancing campaign” against the “Bengali girl” and held placards reading “We will not stop until she gets justice.” Her Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, chief of the Bengal parliament, even gave her the “respect” of the upper castes, calling her the “Bengali Brahmin”. Right-wing fringes and trolls may have ended Khan’s fledgling career now, vowing to keep him in prison so he can’t prey on Hindu women.
In all of this we miss what should have been a real conversation all along. At least give Sharma some grace and dignity.
rinku.ghosh@expressindia.com
