His ruminations on Sartre and Descartes, his musings about Van Gogh and Gaudi, his reflections on stars, galaxies and the cosmos... that’s what Sushant Singh Rajput’s friends, family and co-stars remember him by. Often described as a cross between philosopher and artiste, with the mindset of an astronomer and astrophysicist, the recurrent takeaway from those who got to know Sushant was that he wasn’t your run-of-the-mill ‘hero’. Unlike some heroes, his reading certainly wasn’t confined to the dialogues before a scene is to be shot. Cinema was part of his world, but his world wasn’t limited to the Friday collections. Most parts of his list of ‘50 things’ had little to do with making more movies or earning more money: from deep diving to charting the trajectories of planets, from NASA to CERN, this was a curious, exploratory mind... a seeker.

“He was very talented, and he was a little, I don’t know — I think he was looking for something,” a senior Bollywood actor said of him not long after he passed away. Thousands of fans and followers who were impacted by his death have also been looking for something since then — explanations, answers, closure. His absence has served to remind us, sharply, of the space he had occupied. His loss evoked unprecedented reactions — grief, nostalgia, pain, and rage, too. And that good-looking guy, with a boyish charm and a mind forever curious, became larger than life once he was no longer amidst us.

A superficial reading of the word ‘desirable’ is about physical appeal and glamour. But it’s not that. The point is not about charm or physique or good looks alone. From where we see it, this is about how much you think about a person, about the mind space an individual occupies. And who has occupied a greater mind space this past year than Sushant?

His school in Patna paid a fitting tribute to him last year by sharing the poem Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep. This is how it concludes — Do not stand at my grave and cry; I am not there. I did not die.

He lives amidst us, in the thoughts of those who remember him, each day.