After the postmortem of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, who committed suicide by hanging himself in his Bandra apartment, Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh said Mumbai police will take into account the actor’s reported clinical depression while conducting a probe into his death. The minister said the police will probe the angle of “professional rivalry as a cause for his depression”.
“While the post mortem report says actor @itsSSR committed suicide by hanging himself, there are media reports that he allegedly suffered from clinical depression because of professional rivalry. @MumbaiPolice will probe this angle too,” the minister tweeted.
Mumbai Police found out during the probe that the actor was under medication for depression. No suicide note was found from the spot. Mumbai Police as well as the crime branch officials visited his rented flat on Sunday, but nothing suspicious was found. Rajput had been living with two cooks and a house help.
Rajput was cremated in the presence of family members and close friends from the film and TV industry. Sushant starred in films such as Shuddh Desi Romance, Raabta, Kedarnath and Sonchiriya. But his most prominent role came as cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s in the 2007 biopic, MS Dhoni: The Untold Story. His death has come as another shock for the film fraternity, still recovering from the deaths of Irrfan Khan, Rishi Kapoor and Basu Chatterjee.
Rajput, who made the storybook transition from Patna boy to television and then the starry lights of the Hindi film industry, was the youngest of five siblings and is survived by his father and four sisters. His death has reignited the discussions around the struggle of survival in Bollywood, with many insiders highlighting “cruel and unforgiving” nature of the industry, particularly tough on outsiders. In a telling tweet, veteran actor Dharmendra wrote despite not knowing Rajput personally, his death served as a reminder that the industry could be “cruel”.
Actor-producer Nikhil Dwivedi posted a strongly-worded tweet calling out the “hypocrisy” of the industry after people from the film fraternity wrote they regretted not staying in touch with Sushant. “High and mighty announcing they should have kept in touch with Sushant. Come on, you didn’t! And that’s because his career dipped. So STFU! Are you in touch with Imran Khan, Abhay Deol and others? No! But you were, when they were doing well,” Dwivedi said.
A similar sentiment was echoed by filmmaker Anubhav Sinha, who, without taking names, said the “Bollywood Privilege Club” must sit down and think hard.
Rajput’s last screen appearance was Nitesh Tiwari’s 2019 film Chhichhore, where he played the role of a father who conveys a message of hope and affirmation to his son who has attempted to kill himself. And his last social media post, dedicated to his late mother who died in 2002 when he was a young teen, was on June 3, a foretelling perhaps on what to come. “Blurred past evaporating from teardrops. Unending dreams carving an arc of smile. “And a fleeting life, negotiating between the two,” he wrote on Instagram post with a black and white photograph of his mother.