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It’s hard to believe, days shall pass before the news will at last sink in. Sushant Singh Rajput (1986-2020) is no more. Rajput’s death is another reminder of how working in the Hindi movie industry is not as rosy as it seems like, from the outside.
Professionally, the actor’s career was going great, by the looks of it.
Few actors have transitioned successfully from television to movies, Shah Rukh Khan is one famous instance, Rajput belongs to that select lot, an actor who made it big on the basis of exceptional talent.The death of a creative person, an artist, is always a irreparable loss. Unlike many other professions, artists are capable of working to the end of their lives, you never know what magic they may conjure, and pleasantly surprise us.    Â
Many legendary Indian artists have passed on this year, Sushant Singh Rajput’s death is hard to take. There is something very disturbing and shattering about the death of a young star with the whole world ahead of him.
Rajput plays a cricket coach in this entertaining Abhishek Kapoor drama, the bubbliest, smiling, quick to anger and spontaneous among the trio of enterprising, entrepreneur friends living in Ahmedabad.
It is a likable, winning performance, with Sushant’s character standing for youth, in supporting genuine talent and in communal harmony.
It takes some doing to get noticed among excellent performances by Amit Sadh, Rajkummar Rao and Amrita Puri. Rajput stands out like a diamond.
How hard is it to play a living cricket icon?
Sushant Singh Rajput will be most remembered for his incredible transformation in Neeraj Pandey’s often indulgent biopic M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story.
Rajput gets under the skin of the enigmatic cricketer’s and incredibly nails a challenging, almost impossible-to-replicate role.
The first half of the movie is especially captivating – Dhoni’s humble small-town origins, big-hitting fame, agony of working as a railway ticket collector, turbulent, tragic love life and ultimate hard-won success is nicely depicted.
It is a role of a lifetime, audience engagement depends on Rajput and watch him pull this off, getting the body language, diction and expression absolutely right for a film rendition.
Many competent actors have failed in making the lead biopic role their own, which makes Rajput’s performance even more commendable.
In Nitesh ‘Dangal’ Tiwari’s blockbuster hit Chhichhore, Rajput played a soothing father imparting a gentle life-lesson that failure is not the end of the world.
Rajput’s convincingly plays a college student and, in another timeline, a middle-aged father dealing with his adolescent son’s attempted suicide.
Nitesh Tiwari’s directorial has hilarious (charmingly silly) boys college jokes, the social messaging part is uneven.
But Sushant, supported by good acts by Varun Sharma (superb here), Shraddha Kapoor, Tahir Raj Bhasin and Naveen Polishetty, looks the part.
A measured, held back performance, probably Rajput’s most nuanced.
Afterword
Though the following movies are not consistently good, watch out for Sushant Singh Rajput in the light live-in romance drama Shuddh Desi Romance (2013), as a famous fictional detective in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy (2015), a good-hearted dacoit in the grainy, mitigated dacoit drama Sonchiriya (2019), and a porter in the natural disaster movie Kedarnath (2018).
A Pink Floyd song comes to mind – Shine on you crazy diamond…
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| Sushant Singh Rajput in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy (2015) |