Iamnota rebel: Sushant Singh Rajput

Continued from P 1

Lately, there has been speculation about Sushant’s personal life. Ask him if these conjectures bother him, and he says, “Of course, it bothers me. It is easy for me to be immune to all these stories. This is nothing compared to all that I’ve seen in my life. I could have developed that Teflon coating. But I resisted from doing that deliberately because one quality that every actor should have –– which helps a lot –– is vulnerability. So, I thought if I just make myself immune to all the things that affect me, it would also make me less vulnerable, which is not what I want.” He further adds, “Also, I’d like to think that they’re (some channels) not against me. The digital era came in suddenly and the print media was thinking of surviving. Therefore print also went into the zone –– where it’s not important what the news is, but how many stories you have. You need the stories that the whole world is talking about. They want people to invest their time and read it; so it (the news) has to thrive on sensation. So, they will make fictional stories. If you are creating them, and investing your time writing fictional stories, at least make them interesting.” So are actors soft targets? “Yes, because people don’t expect them to be intelligent or to make sense. We only take a few actors seriously. It’s scientifically proven that you don’t like the things that you are not expecting. So, you’re expecting a guy like me, who should be mad at this point of time because of his recent success. But, he is instead making sense and, at the same time, sounding confident of his work,” states Sushant. Recently, at a press conference, he refused to comment on the Kulbhushan Jadhav death sentence issue. He reasons, “There is this Bollywood way of answering questions. I am not a rebel. I have realised that if I don’t know a thing, I will tell you I don’t know. I will be honest because it takes a lot to lie. I am just making my statement in a confident way. It doesn’t matter if I have an opinion or not. Some people think I have an attitude problem. I have cracked the All India Engineering Entrance Examinations. So, possibly I am intelligent. I knew what the popular opinion was [regarding that subject] when that question was asked. It was easy for me to come up with a frivolous line, but I was not well informed on that topic to make a comment.”