Mohua Das (THE TIMES OF INDIA; June 15, 2020)

Mumbai: Social media — a space in which people build connections, shape their identity, and express themselves — has often been a reflection of actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s mind and myriad interests beyond his life as an actor — his love for his mother to his obsession with the cosmos and a long to-do list of unfinished goals.

Rajput would often take to social media to express what his mother meant to him and his last Instagram post was a poignant one where he wrote: “Blurred past evaporating from teardrops/ Unending dreams carving an arc of smile/ And a fleeting life, negotiating between the two-…Maa”— dedicated to his mother who passed away in 2002, when he was 16. Earlier the actor had shared a picture of a handwritten letter with a poem that he had penned for his mother.

The actor who owned a Meadelx600 telescope with a spectrometer that gave “a feel of a time machine”, one of his prized possessions, had a rare penchant for interstellar space and would often cite Einstein and Rene Descartes alongside pictures of celestial bodies revealing his fascination with the mysteries of the universe and the cosmic importance of ‘Om’. In fact, the actor had seen a rare upside to the lockdown—clearer skies that helped him spend hours spotting stars and planets otherwise difficult in the hazy skies.

The 34-year-old has also left behind an unfinished bucket list, that he had been compiling since last year with over 50 ‘dreams’ — a handwritten catalogue of activities — he wanted to achieve ranging from ‘Learn how to fly a plane’ and ‘Learn Morse Code’ to ‘Paint aurora borealis’ and ‘Teach Coding to visually impaired’.

Curiously, Rajput’s Twitter header is an image of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’, that the Dutch artist — known to have struggled with his own mental illness — had painted shortly before he took his own life in 1890.

In Rajput’s sudden death, there was much left unsaid, undone.