Healing Space | Immortality of grief: How we hold on to Rahul Bajaj, Lata Mangeshkar or Bappi Lahiri

In mourning the passing of Rahul Bajaj, Lata Mangeshkar and Bappi Lahiri, we also mourn who we were when we knew them, their contributions. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

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Whether it’s the disco beats of Bappi Lahiri or the lyrical heights of Lata Mangeshkar, the outspokenness of Rahul Bajaj or the cooking of a grandparent or parent, grief allows us to encase those who have passed in a stardust that does not fade. Nothing will ever be as good as, compete with, or surpass their work and achievements, no one will ever see us the way they did.

In After Life, Ricky Gervais puts a face on a lemon, an inside joke with his deceased wife, to see if the woman he is dating ‘gets it’. Of course she doesn’t, how could she? It’s a game whose odds are stacked against her to begin with. But, that’s how Gervais knows she’s not ‘the one’.

No one else but us who lived in his era will ever get what Rahul Bajaj meant to a fragile and nascent liberalised India. When the titled and monied industrialists were still testing waters, here was his brash, bold, guns blazing, aggressive confidence cutting through the olde worlde kowtowing. In preserving him in such an image, we immortalise not just him, but the era, and ourselves, our fears, our courage. We use the past to define and eliminate the present. And in using our grief as a defining factor, we begrudge the present its options.

What does this mean? It makes us bitter that now we have the vaccines and boosters, but those who went in the early stages of Covid-19, before scientists could even come up with an insight into how to combat it, suffered needlessly. We remind the start-up entrepreneurs that they have it easier than the bulwarks of the past did. As feminists, or LGBTQIA+, we begrudge the present generation a brashness that an older set could never take for granted.

We marvel at the innocence of an age when love was so simple, people could fall in love at first sight and marry each other without having met more than once, that it could all be encapsulated in a single Lata song. Our grandfathers who stayed in one job and retired with dignity, stability, longevity and no drama. In immortalising them, we gloss over how difficult those lives and their actions were. As Lata Mangeshkar confessed in an interview, she would not like to have been Lata Mangeshkar again. There was pain, there was struggle, there were tough choices, there were even consequences. We just gloss over them with nostalgia.

While the Elsabeth Kubler model of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – has been held to be the standard for a while, more recent research shows we all grieve in our own ways. There is no one way, stage or end point. Psychologist George Bonanno even found more people who suffer loss come to acceptance than to despair.

A key to acceptance is the way we hold on to the memories and immortalise the image of the past. We use cultural pins to define our grief, songs, memories, photographs and in some cases, memorialise them in statues, names of streets, stadiums, airports, buildings and institutions such as colleges and schools. So, not only do we mourn the passing of the people we have lost, but who we were when we knew them, their contributions.

Further, through our grief we immortalise them, and we immortalise ourselves. That Lata Mangeshkar lived through stages of broadcast history, that Queen Elizabeth’s platinum jubilee on the throne brings up presidents and celebrities she met as a young woman whom we have only heard of in history books, that Bajaj confronted authority in a crony capitalist world, leaves something of them that never has to die.

This urge to immortalise is how we preserve those whom we must reluctantly release. It gives us a spirit that when we spot in someone else, reminds us not only that they defined a standard, but that it has the capacity to live on. We will remind ourselves and compare an upstart entrepreneur, a new singer on the scene, a maverick performer, and say they have some of Bajaj, Lata, Bappi in them. Of course, they will never live up to it, the urge for immortality demands that we stack that comparison against the new ones, but they will have to try. Because in continuing a legacy, they carry our grief forward.