Rachana Dubey (BOMBAY TIMES; June 15, 2020)

In his 2019 film Chhichhore, Sushant Singh Rajput’s character Anirudh Pathak speaks to his young son about how suicide is not a solution to any problem. Call it a cruel irony of fate — yesterday, the 34-year-old actor took his own life at his Bandra residence. He was found hanging from the ceiling, and his suicide was confirmed by the police.

When we reached out to Nitesh Tiwari, who had directed and written the much-acclaimed Chhichhore, he was in a state of shock. He told Bombay Times, “What Sushant was capable of as an actor is out there for everyone to see. He had proved himself repeatedly. It took me a while to come to terms with what has happened. I had an absolutely wonderful work relationship with this young man. I stayed in touch with him, like I do with all my actors, long after the film is over. It never felt like he had a problem, and I really don’t know what got to him. If I had the slightest inkling, I would have reached out to him and helped him. It is ironic that Sushant is the same guy who had spoken about how one shouldn’t take their own life in Chhichhore.”

Sushant, who was born in Patna, was a bright student, but he dropped out of engineering to pursue a career in showbiz. In an interview with BT in 2018, he had said, “I’m trained for dealing with problems; it’s one of the first things that I learnt in my life and I thank my mother for that. Of course, it’s not like I had many problems in my life, but I was brought up in a manner that I could deal with any situation, if there was one. To think that you will never have a sticky situation in life is a problematic idea by itself. Thankfully, I was taught to anticipate trouble, which makes it a little easier to sail through. Now, you could be in a situation because of yourself or someone else. The better way to deal with it is to just do things that simply make sense to you and the rest falls into place like the pieces of a puzzle…”

Around that time, Sushant had briefly moved his residence to Lonavala from Mumbai. The shift, he had said, helped him pursue his other interests like mathematics and space exploration. “I don’t stay in Lonavala all the time, I’ve a fixed number of days there. In Lonavala, we have tractors, and we do organic farming... You love nature when you are in its lap. Birds, bees, butterflies, mountains, star-lit skies — it makes you realise that a world like that does exist. So yes, acting is just one of the things that I like doing,” he had said.