Bollywood’s One Death Too Many

Pratyusha Banerjee, the young TV actor who starred as ‘Anandi’ in the long-running soap Balika Vadhu on the Colors channel, committed suicide in her flat in Mumbai revealing once again the dark underbelly of the entertainment industry. A troubled love affair with her boyfriend Rahul Raj is being probed; so are the financial problems of an out-of-work actor. But the sickening regularity of suicides among young actors needs Bollywood to sit up and introspect. Has it become a hell hole of smashed dreams? Or, is the work and relationships so stressful that it pushes young people to the brink?

Shikha Joshi, a small time Bollywood actor, killed herself last year in May leaving behind a suicide note alleging a cosmetic surgeon and “many other married men” troubled her. Another high profile death in June 2013 was of actor Jiah Khan, whose family still maintains she was pushed to suicide by her boyfriend and actor Suraj Pancholi. Ironically, Khan played an independent, modern woman in the blockbuster Ghajini in 2008.

There is a strange ‘residential’ pecking order in Mumbai’s entertainment industry. The big guns of the industry like Shahrukh Khan live in bungalows in the posh suburb of Bandra or Juhu. The well-to-do actors, but not the top ones, and the prospering technicians live in flats in the stretch between Seven Bungalows and Yari Road in the western suburb of Andheri. Next come the ‘strugglers’ — a term now part of official Bollywood parlance — who rent out and share small 600 square feet apartments in Poonam Nagar, on the eastern side of the Andheri Expressway. And finally at the bottom of the heap is what is known as MHADA Colony, a semi-slum in the Versova area, where new, starry-eyed immigrants move into hovels and wait for their first audition.

The unregulated industry has no civilised norms. It is cut-throat competition all the way. Some move from Poonam Nagar to Yari Road; most fall by the wayside and move back to Patna or Azamgarh after a few unsuccessful attempts at acting or scriptwriting. Some go into depression. More than a decade ago, I ran into agents who coordinated a factory of script-writers who worked round the clock to produce the lines for Ekta Kapoor’s Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki. These writers, holed up in cramped, badly ventilated rooms, were hired at measly wages that barely covered their bread and board.

But perhaps the worst-off are the young, female actors who do two or three films or a TV serial and then lose their way. In a male-dominated industry, female actors are paid half their male counterparts, and are case aside as ‘old’ before they enter their 30s. They are exploited and demeaned, and are left alone to face a cruel world. There is usually a heart-rending tale of breached contracts behind each of the suicides that seem to originate from a botched love affair. The Versova Police Station, which stands amidst the Mumbai’s filmisthan, probably registers a couple of criminal cases every week of fraud, assault and wrongful confinement of these ‘strugglers’.

Behind all the glitz and glamour of the film and TV entertainment industry, there is a woeful lack support for the hundreds that serve it. Its own financials are in deep trouble. Calendar 2014 was a flat year; for 2015, the latest Ficci-KPMG report claims an insipid growth of 9.3 per cent with total revenue of Rs 13,820 crore. For an industry that completed 100 years of existence in 2013, its financials leave much to be desired. It is run by a few family-owned production houses, and all talk of ‘corporatisation’ of the industry has ended with presentations in Ficci-Frames type conclaves.

There is no industry like the film industry that can rival the passion and the dreams that people enter with; and none can match the disappointment it generates. It is about time the Godfathers of the industry seriously think of entry-level norms, counselling and how to keep away the vultures that prey on so many young souls. Or, we just wait for the next suicide?