Kuljeet Randhawa - another sacrifice to the march to success

Kuljeet Randhawa’s suicide is being touted as yet another evidence of the dark underbelly of the glamour world, a sign of its loose foundations where the inhuman pressure and competition drives people to take the extreme step….after Nafisa Joseph, this is another model suicide that has made headlines……and that is why it has made the headline, because they were models, because...well, they were beautiful women.

Humans take a sadistic, though most of the time completely subconscious, pleasure in seeing our icons or people who are touted as having ‘made it’ (created by the entertainment media of course) being dragged through the mud, falling from grace or perhaps showing the all too common human trait of fraility. Perhaps we take this pleasure because somehow we feel incomplete when compared to the media generated images of successful and glamorous people, perhaps we feel our imperfections all too glaringly. That is why we feel a gratified pleasure when we see our ‘stars’ showing themselves to be all too human, showing themselves to be made of flesh and blood and more importantly, showing themselves to be having the same emotional needs and the same emotional weaknesses that they somehow seem to have transcended when they supposedly ‘made it’……that is why Kuljeet Randhawa’s suicide will make headlines for some time, till she has been made all human…..then the cycle will start all over again….idolizing our ‘celebs’, dreaming that we perhaps wd also make it their way (the ones who do, realize all too soon, the shadow behind the sun, but then the need to fit in comes in – that too is a vicious cycle) and taking secret pleasure in their downfall…..Kuljeet has been used for all three purposes and unfortunately she will be remembered as the model who committed suicide rather than the girl who some how felt that there was no way out…...that, as always, will be a tragedy….

The question is, why did she kill herself? Let me try and answer the question by first realizing the fact that suicides are not confined to only the glamour world (of course they are not) but also to other high stress workplaces – advertising, event management etc. but the suicides in the glamour world does get noticed more, again for the same reasons I gave before.

Bertrand Russell, in his seminal book ‘Conquest of Happiness’, stressed on the importance of family and familial ties in taking away the poison of everyday life from our system. He pointed out that the reason for most of the unhappiness getting multiplied is the breakup of the family bondings. Nothing much has changed since the publication of those thoughts except the acceleration of disintegration of familial support and the support that was once taken as granted. Among all our relationships in life, perhaps the family is the only one that provides emotional and if possible financial support in the darkest phases of our lives, emotional support being the more important ones and its all done selflessly (unless you count the reason for protecting their children as selfish). The generation gap is always present (though not always, as much as we like to believe) but that’s does not prevent the family from standing by us when we need them the most. Some lucky few could count having as good a spouse, though frankly, that is becoming rarer…..

The need for the family bond takes on greater importance when we are thrown into an alien culture or unknown territory, which all careers provide to a large or small extent, but it is more pronounced in the so called ‘glamour’ industry especially for families who have never ventured out of the traditional career folds and whose children are attracted to the surreal world beckoning them from every corner of the city or town. The other name of youth is confidence, especially if they see themselves fulfilling the conditions required to take their steps through the golden or silver screens……once they arrive, they realize the pitfalls involved, the compromises required – whether its the ethics or the sacrifices. The ones who can adjust or turn a blind eye and ear to these find the tenacity to stay on but the ones who cannot (especially since the values of this industry differ more markedly from the values imbibed in them, than most other vocations in life), go down in an ever downward spiral.

The problem therefore is support or the lack of it. What is required by these young people is someone who can help them in their everyday dilemmas, who can tell them whether what they are doing is right or wrong, in the long run, someone who can do so without expecting anything in return. This is where the family comes in or more importantly, the support that they bring. People like Kuljeet lived in a different city from her parents and therefore must have craved for something similar to family, whose effect naturally diminished with distance and more so because of the very different settings of the industry she was in, something she must have hoped from her boyfriends or lovers, who were from the same industry and so were in a better position to understand the issues involved.

It can be deduced that she didn’t get it, for as psychologists say, people would kill themselves, mostly when they realize that they have no one to turn to. What were the details, did he dump her, did he betray her, did they fight….i am not interested in those, because they are irrelevant. Perhaps the fleeting nature of the industry was a factor, whose effect trickle down into relationships.

What is relevant, however, is that we as a society failed her. The greater tragedy is that we don’t seem to realize our culpability. We don’t realize that its not a stand-alone death but a deeper malaise that afflicts all of us. We all feel the yawning despair of the possibility of failure, the fear of losing the people we depend on, for our needs. Only the superhuman among us transcend these and I am not talking about them. For us mortals, we survive because we have our pillars of support (which we become acutely conscious of only when we need them the most). Take those away in our darkest and our weakest time and I assure you, few of us can resist the downward spiral. Clearly Kuljeet had reached the bottom and the light had gone from above.

I somehow feel we are moving too quickly, in chasing our dreams, whatever our careers might be. Too soon, we are breaking down the foundations that have sustained and nurtured humans. And we try to put the palliative on this by saying that this is the cost for progress and for taking the fast forward to success. The media all around is awash with all the good life that can be had, people like Kuljeet just find out its highest price.