Eulogy - Raghuvaran

Success can be as lethal as failure sometimes.
This was the last line from the eulogy that was published on March 19, 2008 edition of the evening daily, News Today. Connect the dots, from Hollywood star Heath Ledger to Raghuvaran in Kollywood don’t you see a pattern and price they pay as a result of success?

Both these actors had solid performances, mass appeal, brand value, highly successful careers, wonderful families, doted wife, yet they dug their grave very early. Why did this happen? Is it because of the loneliness at the top? Is it the pressure from sustaining success? It is due to the adrenalin rush from maintaining the “Cool image” in the industry? Is success is a sweet poison?

Two words that come to my mind when I think of movie industry are glitter and guilt. Glitter is easy to handle but guilt is ticking time bomb. Is movie industry a great industry to be in though it looks grand and glamorous? Let us introspect. So many people enter the industry and it takes more than hard work and luck to hold on to stardom. Not everyone who enters is guaranteed of success nor they become Rajnikanth, Amitabh, Kamalhassan or Manorama, Shabana Azmi. Men usually step out and take up off screen roles such as producers when star value wanes. May be the reality is even more gross and horrid if you are a women? What happened to silk Smitha, Fadafat, Parvin Bhabhi, Madhubala? All of them were glamour dolls and reigning queens when tragedy struck them.

Addiction to drugs, tobacco, alcohol, meat trade, etc is not new in the glamour industry, to some it is a stepping stone to success and to some becomes the tombstone. Some people have been lucky like Sanjay Dutt, Nagesh and life has given them a second chance to live, but not everyone as is lucky as them. It is sad to see brilliant lives wither in bud. I hope people in the movie industry more importantly than other professions will realize the value of life and lethal side of success.

Where will these artist who entertain the world go when it comes to forgetting their worries? Drugs, alcohol, meat can be a temporary relief for pain in the heart and mind, and often takes them into a bigger spiral without any return. Spiritually is often the last resort for people who have tried out all other options early on in life. I have personally seen Raghuvaran, at times with his mother and son at the both the temples (daily 7 pm at Sai Baba temple Mylapore and Saturdays 6 PM at Hanuman temple, Alwarpet). The lanky bespectacled man walks in the temple with a lugubrious face and usually walks out with a tilak on his forehead and a relaxed smile. May be that was his Prozac for the day? Nobody knows and sometimes nobody will ever understand the language of the heart and the mind. One could see the struggle on his face while he folds his palms and surrenders to the almighty asking for clemency. I thought he had everything in life that every man in the movie industry dreams to have – successful career, a doted wife, a charming son, access to money. What more would one ask for? A struggle for what? May be a piece of mind to handle worries, success, foibles?

Next time when I am at the temple my eyes will wander and mind will look for the lanky man. This time I will grapple to understand the true meaning success, the transient nature life, and happiness. I will ask God if death was clemency in his kingdom.

News Today Article:
NT Bureau Wed, 19 Mar, 2008,03:01 PM
The quintessential psychopathic baddie of Tamil cinema, the man who gave villainy on screen a good name, Raghuvaran died here at a private hospital after battling personal demons and a few other debilitating physical problems. He was 49.
Raghuvaran is survived by his former wife actress Rohini (the couple had divorced) and their son, Nanda.
Raghuvaran had been unwell for the last few years and had taken a sabbatical from active films for some time. Sivapathigaram, released some time last year, marked his comeback. After that he was a regular figure acting in big films including Rajnikanth’s Sivaji. His last release was however Sila Nerangalil and Bheema (which had been made some time back).
The life of lanky Raghuvaran, who made his debut as a brooding Commie hero in Ezhavathu Manithan under the direction of Hariharan, eventually turned out to be bitter-sweet as he had to constantly fight his tendency to embrace the easier pleasures that were easily available to impressionable youngsters in Kollywood.
Unable to handle the success and fame that came his way early, Raghuvaran fell into bad habits, from which he never really came out till his untimely death today.
But even as he was living life on the edge with women, wine and many other seductive things, Raghuvaran also managed to win a name for himself as someone whose acting ability was refreshingly sans the usual Kollywood cliches. After playing hero roles not with egregious success, Raghuvaran was quick to switch over to the archetypal middle-class character roles. Films like Samsaram Adhu Minsaram, Aaha, Mugavari, Amarkkalam, Run, and many others with Rajnikanth including Muthu, Arunachalam, Siva, Sivaji, Raja Chinna Roja proved his versatility.
But it was as a villain, with shades of deep black and a touch of enigmatic and over-the-top eccentricity, that Raghuvaran’s eventual screen image came to be defined. The scene in which he completely lets himself loose, mouthing ‘I know’ for heaven knows how many times, in the film Puriyatha Puthir, became so popular that his real-life image was almost suspected to be something similar. It was one of the myths that he could never really shake off.
But even as he was fighting what eventually turned out to be a losing battle with the bottle, a spiritual and an ersatz philosophical side to his persona also opened up. He also became a devotee of Sai Baba. It was during this phase he struck a romantic chord with actress Rohini and married her.
The marriage, as it happened, like his film career promised a lot, but ended up mighty short. The couple had a son Nanda, on whom Raghuvaran was doting. When the marriage ended up in the courts, Raghuvaran became an even more broken man and reportedly fell into his self-created abyss. Though well-meaning individuals, who thought highly of his acting skills, tried to shore him up with some film offers all through last year, Raghuvaran was for all practical purposes had called it quits — on films and life too.
In the event, his end, though surprising in its immediate aftermath, was something that was foretold the moment he courted early success. Raghuvaran’s life, like some of his movies including the almost biographical Idhu Oru Manidhanin Kadhai, was something of a cautionary morality play. A noir show of how success could be as lethal as a failure, sometimes.

Addiction to Devices

Addiction to devices seems to be a bigger problem than drugs, alcohol, pornography and tobacco. Barrage of e-trash invade our computers and hand held devices and being connected spells DISASTER!

Ask yourself if you ever had a day without your laptop or mobiles. If not then you are in for a serious trouble. Knowledge is power, but staying connected 24 by 7 means complete mental discharge and exhaustion.

Today the e-human is a walking gadget museum embedded with PDA, blue tooth headset, ipod, etc. We live in a neurotic world with quick turn-around time and software industry demands decision making in micro seconds. What does all this mean? It means be available and connected 24 by 7. The moment you reach a key position in an organization you are bequeathed with a laptop, data card and hand held. Does it mean you are given a shield and a sword, or recognition for your performance, pride and ego, No, in hindsight it only means slavery and addiction.

I have seen many of my friends at work meddle and fiddle with their PDA’s every few minutes. I find them extremely disturbed and mentally occupied. They are physically present but mentally disconnected from the conversation. There is never a moment of silence, and it looked both funny and dangerous to me. These guys also take their devices to bed, which is more annoying than their partners. There was a time when these guys reached out to check on their partner at night, but now they reach out for their devices and read messages at wee hours. Sounds crazy and obsessive huh? Yes it is OCD of a different kind.

Sometimes I wonder if we are creating a new species prone to insomnia and device addiction. May be we will soon have rehab centers and groups such as Alcohol anonymous for Techno addicts.

Sleep is the biggest blessing given to mankind and I thank god I don’t have working weekends and I don’t carry the addictive Blackberry. If I did then I would go insane and extinct. I don’t take any electronic gadgets into my bedroom – be it mobile phone, laptops or other kinds. They for sure are No no!

Stop here and now invest few minutes to read an article from NY TIMES on Gadget Addiction


I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really.
By MARK BITTMAN For NY Times
Published: March 2, 2008
I TOOK a real day off this weekend: computers shut down, cellphone left in my work bag, land-line ringer off. I was fully disconnected for 24 hours.
The reason for this change was a natural and predictable back-breaking straw. Flying home from Europe a few months ago, I swiped a credit card through the slot of the in-seat phone, checked my e-mail and robbed myself of one of my two last sanctuaries.

At that point, the only other place I could escape was in my sleep. Yet I had developed the habit of leaving a laptop next to my bed so I could check my e-mail, last thing and first thing. I had learned how to turn my P.D.A. into a modem, the better to access the Web from my laptop when on a train. Of course I also used that P.D.A. in conventional ways, attending to it when it buzzed me.

In short, my name is Mark, and I'm a techno-addict. But after my airplane experience, I decided to do something about it. Thus began my "secular Sabbath" — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief.

Like many, though, I wondered whether breaking my habit would be entirely beneficial. I worried about the colleagues, friends, daughters, parents and so on who relied on me, the people who knew that whether I was home or away I would get back to them, if not instantly then certainly before the end of the day. What if something important was happening, something that couldn't wait 24 hours?

Or was I just one of those Americans who've developed the latest in American problems, Internet addiction disorder?

As a baby boomer, I knew mine was no unique thought; we've always been part of some trend or other. And sure enough, as soon as I started looking I found others who felt the need to turn off, to take a stab at reconnecting to things real rather than virtual, a moderate but carefully observed vacation from ubiquitous marketing and the awesome burden of staying in touch.
Nor is this surprising, said David Levy, a professor in the information school at the University of Washington. "What's going on now is insane," he said, assuring me that he used the term intentionally. "Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement." (Dr. Levy coined the term "information environmentalism.")
"Who," he then asked, "would say you don't need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?"

THIS movement to unplug appears to be gaining traction everywhere, from the blogosphere, where wired types like Ariel Meadow Stallings (http://electrolicious.com/unplugged) brag about turning off the screen one day a week (and how many books they've read so far this year), to the corporate world.

For example, Nathan Zeldes, a principal engineer at Intel (employees there read or send three million e-mail messages daily), is running a couple of experiments, one in which people spend a morning a week at work but offline, another in which people consciously reduce their e-mail output. Though he's not reporting results, he's encouraged and he says people are participating.
"Even many corporate leaders now believe you need time to hear the voice of the new inside," said Anne Dilenschneider, a spirituality consultant in Montara, Calif., a coastal town 17 miles south of San Francisco. "And this time need not be a day, or even a specific period, activity or lack of one. It doesn't necessarily mean a Zen sit, just some time of solitude."

Even without a Zen sit (enough to scare me away from anything) or a phrase like "the voice of the new," I found that the secular Sabbath was not all that easy to maintain. Something as simple as turning off the electronics is easy, but try to make a habit of it.

On my first weekend last fall, I eagerly shut it all down on Friday night, then went to bed to read. (I chose Saturday because my rules include no television, and I had to watch the Giants on Sunday). I woke up nervous, eager for my laptop. That forbidden, I reached for the phone. No, not that either. Send a text message? No. I quickly realized that I was feeling the same way I do when the electricity goes out and, finding one appliance nonfunctional, I go immediately to the next. I was jumpy, twitchy, uneven.

I managed. I read the whole paper, without hyperlinks. I tried to let myself do nothing, which led to a long, MP3-free walk, a nap and some more reading, an actual novel. I drank herb tea (caffeine was not helpful) and stared out the window. I tried to allow myself to be less purposeful, not to care what was piling up in my personal cyberspace, and not to think about how busy I was going to be the next morning. I cooked, then went to bed, and read some more.
GRADUALLY, over this and the next couple of weekends — one of which stretched from Friday night until Monday morning, like the old days — I adapted.

But recidivism quickly followed; there were important things to do — deadlines, urgent communications. You know how it is. I called Andrea Bauer, an executive and career development coach in San Carlos, Calif. She assured me that, oddly enough, it takes work to stop working. "It takes different formats for different people, and you have to build up to it; you can't run five miles if you've never run at all." Increasingly, I realized that there is more to the secular Sabbath than an impulse, or even a day off from e-mail. And there are reasons that nonsecular Sabbaths — the holy days of Christians, Jews and Muslims — have rules that require discipline. Even for the nonreligious, those rules were once imposed: You need not be elderly to remember when we had no choice but to reduce activity on Sundays; stores and offices — even restaurants — were closed, there were certainly no electronics, and we were largely occupied by ourselves or our families.

Now it's up to us, and, as Dr. Levy says, there's little encouragement. "One of the problems with needing to slow down is that within the climate of our primary culture it sounds wishy-washy," he said.

But what's wishy-washy about taking time off? It didn't seem to me that I had to collect Social Security before I realized that a 70-hour week was nearly as productive as an 80-hour one, and if I couldn't get it all done in either, it certainly wasn't because I was taking too much time off.
I went back to nonwork, diligently following my rules to do less one day a week. The walks, naps and reading became routine, and all as enjoyable as they were before I had to force myself into doing them. It's been more than six months, and while I'm hardly a new man — no one has yet called me mellow — this achievement is unlike any other in my life. And nothing bad has happened while I've been offline; the e-mail and phone messages, RSS feeds, are all there waiting for me when I return to them.

I would no more make a new-agey call to find inner peace than I would encourage a return to the mimeograph. But I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn't such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.