The storm had already claimed the lives of at least two people in China's Hainan and 16 people in the Philippines
asia11 hours ago
How would you feel if a stranger barged into your home right now? Sauntered into your sanctum sanctorum, casually picked up your journal and started reading your deeply personal notes?
As I watched the armchair journalist hold forth her mobile phone to the screen, from the cosy comfort of her bedroom, to show viewers the telltale pages of an intensely personal diary written by Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, my last defense crumbled. I admit I was among those who had bought into the suicide narrative when it was first postulated. It was only when the tell-tale videos and lack of evidence were bandied about on social media that I felt there could perhaps be more to what the Mumbai Police had glibly pronounced as an 'open and shut' suicide case.
But even then none of us were prepared for the outpouring of salacious gossip and the most absurd murder theories that have been playing out non-stop across 'news' channels.
'How would you feel,' I mentally screamed out, 'if someone just opened up your mobile phone and published your personal messages to the entire world to devour?'
Sushant Singh Rajput was by all accounts an artist who lived life on his own terms. He was known to be selective about the scripts he chose to work on, refusing at times even to engage with the media to brag about his success. He maintained a regular diary; had a to-do list including all that he hoped to accomplish in his life.
He surely doesn't deserve strangers going through his intimate stuff. He doesn't deserve the complete hysteria with which so called 'fans' have intruded into his world to rip apart probably everything he held dear - his love, his family, his career, his deepest darkest secrets, and his inner longings.
Forget Sushant Singh Rajput, none of us deserve this callous treatment in the name of justice.
Watching television channels and 'journalists' rip apart someone's carefully constructed life, and an image they probably spent a major chunk of their life building up is not the right to information that we signed up for.
Interestingly most of the drama surrounding the actor's death is being explained away as a human craving to seek closure.
Every single aspect of our life on this earth is defined by the need to tie up loose ends. Just as the day fades into the night and seasons blend into each other, there is a universal rhythm to nature that we seek to mirror in our own lives.
That is why a part of me heaved a sigh of relief when officials announced that Glee star Naya Rivera's body had been found in Lake Piru in California, where the actress had gone missing while on a boating expedition with her four-year-old son. The search operations had been going on for an excruciating five days, with officials at one point warning there were chances the body might never be found.
As tributes poured in from family, friends and fans, I was reminded of Madeleine McCann's family, who has been waiting for 13 long years for some form of closure.
There are thousands of others in similar positions; people forced to mechanically go about their lives as one part of their existence remains frozen in the past - a missing family member, an abrupt end of a relationship, a conversation cut short and more.
Reading John Travolta's measured yet heartbreaking tribute to his wife of 28 years, Kelly Preston, who passed away after a long battle with breast cancer, the irony remains - that there are people who are taken from this world forcibly, men and women with dreams and aspirations for their future as well as those of their loved ones. And then there are others who 'chose' to cut off all relations with no thought of the unimaginable sadness they leave behind, not just for those who knew them, sometimes, tragically, even for those who have never met them.
Unfortunately life isn't always that easy to tie up. Sometimes we tend to get so unidimensional in our search for closure that we become blind to what we have turned into.
Closure is well and good, but in our relentless pursuit for a sense of justice, let's not leave our morals behind.
So tell me, how would you feel if someone just walked into your home and opened your diary and read aloud your musings?
-ambica@khaleejtimes.com
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