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In an interview during his television days, Sushant Singh Rajput was asked about his favourite book. He sheepishly replied that he wasn’t into reading, but if he were to pick one he’d pick his Physics text book, because he didn’t understand it at one go, and had to spend a lot of time with it.

Half a decade later, he had launched a Twitter handle exclusively to discuss books with fellow bibliophiles. Most of his recommendations were books on Quantum Mechanics and the nature of existence. He was espousing Nietschze and Einstein to his friends. His Instagram bio read “Photon in a double-slit”, referring to a famous experiment about the wave behaviour of light and matter. A lot had changed. As if he was on a different quest than when he started.

It all probably begun when he was studying engineering.

Sushant was an introvert, and the world doesn’t take kindly to introverts. The writer of this piece can say this from personal experience. Introverts are often seen as arrogant and people hate them with a vengeance. One has to adopt a veneer of gregariousness in order to be accepted. It was during his engineering college days that Sushant discovered how acting was a more efficient way for a shy person to communicate, and speak their mind. Naseeruddin Shah has spoken about this on numerous occasions, and so has Irrfan Khan. Acting, especially acting on stage, is a tool for introverts to express themselves.

First Shiamak’s dance troupe and then Barry John. Theatre had captured his imagination, relegating academics to the background. Sushant had been bright and perceptive. He had aced almost all the exams he wrote. A great academic career lay ahead. Anyone in their right mind would stay the course, play by the rules. But there was a fork in the road and [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]he chose the road less traveled by.[/highlight] Sushant dropped out of college and plunged into the world of theatre.

Nadira Babbar’s theatre group Ekjute became his home and he pranced about on the stage of Prithvi Theatre, squeezing a bit of himself in every performance. He was spotted at one of the plays, and landed a role in Balaji Telefilms’ Kis Desh Mein Hai Mera Dil, and then moved on to Pavitra Rishta with his breakout role as Manav. He was Manav and Manav was him. He was finally a star. It was the golden age of soaps and TV stars had a formidable following. Sticking around would mean money, fame and continued success. Another fork in the road—and once again, Sushant chose the untrodden path. At the prime of his TV stardom, he chose to leave it all behind and ship out to UCLA to learn acting.

A chance encounter with Mukesh Chhabra swiftly got him to the sets of Kai Po Che. And he worked harder than ever before. Even in a film with Rajkummar Rao who had already worked with the Anurags and Dibakars of the world, a boy from the saas-bahu universe received rave reviews. “He has all the trappings of a star”, said Taran Adarsh in his review. Rajeev Masand, for once, agreed: “But it’s Sushant Singh Rajput, making his film debut as Ishaan, who it’s hard to take your eyes off. The actor has an indescribable presence, and it’s clear from his confidence and distinct likability that a star is born”. Raja Sen said, “Rajput gives a new meaning to the expression, ‘the idealism of the youth’”.

Remember Shuddh Desi Romance and PK? They were his second and third movies, respectively. I had to go back to his filmography and verify this because by this time Sushant had seasoned so well that it was inconceivable that he wasn’t 8 or 9 films old. It was all the more evident in his fourth, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy. Dibakar Bannerjee was as perfectionist a director as it could possibly get, and going against all conventional wisdom, he had cast a 29 year-old mainstream actor to play a Bengali detective from the 1940s. But Sushant prepped like a maniac. Bannerjee showed him Satyajit Ray’s Chiriyakhana (in which Uttam Kumar plays an older Byomkesh)—his brief was for Sushant to extrapolate from this a young man, unsure of himself, who’s destined to grow old into Uttam’s version of the character. In the resultant film, Sushant Singh Rajput was a sight for sore eyes. It was like a feral animal had been let loose. He was primal. But this well-crafted gem of a film didn’t get the audience it deserved.

He was also being offered Paani with Shekhar Kapur. He was elated. In the company of artists like Dibakar and Shekhar, his mind was expanding. He would befriend Anand Gandhi, the maverick director of Ship of Theseus, who shared his enthusiasm about science and the secrets of the universe.

M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story is probably Sushant’s most widely accepted film. He did play Cricket at school but to play a master cricketer he had to be really good at it. Ex-cricketer Kiran More coached him for months and by the time he was shooting, Sushant Singh Rajput was almost a cricketer himself. He got it to a T, even the iconic Helicopter Shot. The film was a huge success. He received critical acclaim, and won over hardcore Cricket fans as well. This was Sushant Singh Rajput’s fifth movie overall. I know it’s stupid to compare, but [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]Amitabh Bachchan’s fifth movie was Reshma Aur Shera, Dilip Kumar’s was Nadiya Ke Paar, and Aamir’s fifth was a snake-filled spectacle called Tum Mere Ho.[/highlight]

Sushant Singh Rajput had a powerful telescope—a Meade 14 LX600—in his study, a few feet away from the books on philosophy and quantum mechanics that he consumed so intently. One would imagine that as he enriched his inner world, his distance with the real world around him was growing longer and longer. He was an “outsider” in almost every sense of the term. And I’m not talking about the industry here. We live in a world that scoffs at the word “intellectual”. It’s almost a bad word, an abuse. Those who think deeply are a tough burden for our society to bear. True talent is so unbearable that we make life unbearable for them. Remember Guru Dutt? Ritwik Ghatak, Sukanta Bhattacharya, Saadat Hassan Manto, the list is long.

Sonchiriya, Abhishek Chaubey’s follow-up to Udta Punjab, was about dacoits of the Chambal ravines in the 1970s. Sushant played Lakhan Singh, a young member of a gang who seemed to have his heart in the right place. It was a fantastic film—gritty, realistic and true to its roots. By his own admission, it was his most “different experience”. He, like everyone else in the film, was speaking the dialect of Bundelkhand. His co-star Manoj Bajpayee explained later how relentlessly this fellow actor from Bihar would work on his craft, trying to perfect his gait, his run, his emphasis on words. Manoj also spoke about the books of Quantum Mechanics on Sushant’s side table. [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]Sushant carried his telescope to the sets, spent hours gazing at the stars and invited everybody else to join him.[/highlight] He chatted with Manoj on a host of subjects ranging from Astronomy and Astrology to Physics and human conflict. While this childlike curiosity prevailed off camera, Sushant played the dacoit with unparalleled ferocity. But like all his great work, the film didn’t get audience support. Nobody saw it.

Nitesh Tiwari was making a campus film after the astronomical success of Dangal. He was looking for an actor who could play a college-going kid and the father of a college-going kid with equal ease. Sushant Singh Rajput seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Chhichhore was warmly received, and became the second film of his, after MS Dhoni, which grossed more than Rs. 200 crores at the box office.

We Indians are one of the most hospitable peoples on this planet, but we are also capable of great cruelty. Tying crackers on the tails of dogs is a popular pastime of kids in small towns. People use all manner of sticks and twigs to poke at animals in cages. But we reserve the most despicable savagery for our fellow humans.

Two of Shushant’s pet projects were Shekhar Kapur’s Paani and a space movie called Chanda Mama Door Ke for which he actually trained at NASA. Those projects were considered unviable since Sushant’s credibility to shoulder big budget projects was suspect. But before training our guns at Bollywood lobbies and dropping the N bomb at the slightest provocation, it may be important to stop and introspect why we choose the banality of Baaghi 2 and Dhoom 3 over honest, experimental films. And it’s this culture of rejecting what’s different and off the beaten path that may have had a bigger hand in the ostracization of Sushant Singh Rajput and the likes of him. And in our angry reaction to his death, we are probably unknowingly pushing other Sushants over the edge.

Sushant was being treated for clinical depression, a condition that is unsurprisingly common today. Many amongst us suffer in silence. And there need not be a “reason” for it in the conventional sense. It’s crucial to be cognizant of this. If there is one thing we should teach ourselves in the wake of this tragedy, it is this: “Be kind”. It will avert plenty of heartburn, and more such tragedies.

Rishi Kapoor — Tujh mein kya hai deewane
A Bengali film buff growing up in 1980s small town India was overwhelmed with a plethora of influences. On the one hand there was the Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani universe. Sunday afternoons were about “regional cinema”, where one was gradually getting exposed to names like Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Aravindan. And the works of Ray, Ghatak and Mrinal Sen were like a rite of passage for any Bong kid. We were of course bored to death with some of it but unwittingly, it was all seeping into our bones.

On the other extreme end were Sunday evenings and VHS sessions. While Amitabh Bachchan was like this benevolent God who kept on giving, he was less ‘accessible’, only to be found on video cassettes. For some reason, the national broadcaster rarely showed his films. The weekly shows on Sunday evenings (and later Saturdays and Tuesday afternoons) were reserved for Dev Anand, Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra, Joy Mukherjee, Biswajeet and… [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]Rishi Kapoor[/highlight]. While Bachchan had completely engulfed us, Rishi was the only other actor we truly enjoyed watching on screen. That smile could melt mountains. Bachchan with his swag and super-heroic invulnerability was a natural pull for kids our age, but Rishi managed to keep us engaged without any of these shenanigans. Because he was, contrary to popular (including his own) perception, a great actor even back then.

Adaakari

The mainstream Hindi film industry (“Bollywood” as a term wasn’t in circulation yet) was experiencing its worst phase back in the 1980s. So much so that many were declaring it dead. The middle class had all but given up on this form of entertainment, barring reruns on TV and video rentals. Nobody went to theatres anymore. Precious few films were able to recover their investment, even fewer reported hits at the box office. In the middle of this dry spell, Rishi Kapoor had a blockbuster in Nagina (1986).

It was around this time that Rishi appeared in an interview for a Canadian television channel, which remains his only televised interview from that time.

”Jo cheez badi routine ho, usey aap ek novel tareeke se karke dikhaaye, uss cheez ko main bahut maanta hoon kyonki main khud ek spontaneous kism ka actor hoon”

He was, of course, referring to his approach to acting. Nobody at the time bothered too much about “the craft”. Nobody spoke about it, nobody wanted to hear about it. But here Rishi Kapoor, a “commercial cinema” actor, was talking about his “craft”. And this brings to light another aspect that was unique about that era.

Like in the rest of the world, the cinema of India was undergoing a shift in the 70s. A commitment to realism and what was seen as an emphasis on substance rather than form, gave rise to the Parallel Cinema movement. While its foundations were laid in the 50s, the movement gained wide acceptance in the 70s and 80s with the likes of Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Saeed Mirza, Kumar Shahani and Mani Kaul doing their thing. This created a schism between the “commercial” cinema of the day and the so-called “art films”. These categories were neatly divided and the filmmakers and patrons of either kind of cinema would scoff at the other. But a curious fallout of this was that the so-called commercial cinema actors—like Rishi Kapoor—were seen with derision. Since they sang and danced and fought, they were perceived as bad actors. And that is what Kapoor was referencing in his interview. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Mainstream Hindi cinema has had a lingua franca of its own that it has evolved over the years. And while it cannot be blamed for making the audience “think”, it has left indelible impressions on the Indian psyche. It exists in its own Universe, with its own Reality. Loud, gesticulative acting is a hallmark of this kind of cinema. But there are some actors who have—while staying true to this universe—figured out their own “method” of infusing their performances with a certain sense of naturalism. Sanjeev Kumar, Ashok Kumar, Rekha and Rishi Kapoor are prime examples. Rishi for one has never dabbled in serious cinema—with the exception of the very unsure Ek Chadar Maili Si – and nor did he actively partake in the Kapoor family tradition of theatre.

But pick up the silliest of titles from his filmography, and Rishi’s acting in it is characterised by a sincerity that is present in some of his better known work as well. Consider Tawaif (1985), a B.R. Chopra film where Rishi plays Dawood, a wannabe writer who ends up having to live-in with a courtesan when she lands on his doorstep one night. Playing the template Muslim youngster commonly seen in “Muslim Socials” those days, not only is his Urdu diction flawless, he plays the part with a felicity mostly seen in actors trained on the stage: using space efficiently, interacting with props, economy of movement, impeccable timing. And the same elements can be seen in Ravi Tandon’s Rahi Badal Gaye (1985), where he plays dual roles, one of them visibly older. Rishi uses merely his body language to convey one person to have seen more years and the other being more effervescent and youthful. And then there was Duniya (1984), where he was pitted against Dilip Kumar. All these were uni-dimensional characters cut-out from cardboards. He almost never had meticulously written roles. But Rishi played them with a vitality not even expected of him in these parts. If you see him in these roles, it is inconceivable that he was doing multiple shifts a day, hopping from set to set.

And that’s why back in 1987 when his colleagues never spoke of such things, Rishi said in that interview: ”Main koi designed, created ya koi engineered acting nahi karta hoon. Main inn cheezon ko maanta nahin hoon. Jaise cheezen aati hain woh kar leta hoon, jo nahin aati woh nahi kar paata..”

Doosra Janam Rishi Kapoor

Around the year 2000, a new generation of filmmakers were bringing about a change in the way mainstream cinema was made. The parallel cinema movement had all but died, leaving offsprings in the shape of prodigious directors like Anurag Kashyap, Imtiaz Ali and Vishal Bharadwaj. Ashutosh Gowariker and Farhan Akhtar were demonstrating that socially conscious and realistic cinema can be made without alienating those seeking entertainment in the movies. The two cinemas were coming closer and closer until inevitably, they were fused together.

In this new world, “commercial actors” like Rishi Kapoor who had never set foot inside FTII or worked with Gulzar or Hrishikesh Mukherjee, should have found themselves at sea. But something unexpected happened. It was like he had suddenly been set free. All those years of animated gestures and loud dialogue deliveries and the flamboyance seemed to have been a solid grounding for the eccentric parts he was expected to play now, especially Romi Rolly in Luck By Chance (2009), Santosh Duggal in Do Dooni Chaar (2010), Rauf Lala in Agneepath, and the grandfather in Kapoor & Sons (2016). Notably, the new breed of directors employing him now had all grown up on the same commercial masala films Rishi Kapoor was a part of. They were all film buffs—and smart ones at that, so they knew how to play to his strengths.

But this wasn’t a 2.0. It was the same set of skills, he was just employing them more consciously. He was more liberated. He took flight. Like he wrote in his autobiography ‘Khullam Khulla’, acting to him was ‘putting in effort to show effortlessness’. Unlike most movie critics and reviewers, Rishi Kapoor’s fans were not shocked or even surprised at what he was able to do now. We always knew. We were just having a ball seeing him have a ball.

This year he was about to reinterpret Robert De Niro’s role from The Intern, and team up with Juhi Chawla after 20 years for a film called Sharmaji Namkeen.

And the man had hardly even reached his prime. For all we know, Rishi Kapoor was just getting started.

IMDB link of Rishi Kapoor