By Sid Sharma
I like being lied to. Being told that any obstacle can be overcome. Heroes always save the day. And, of course, there’s always an attractive girl who’ll see beyond your acne and awkwardness and love the “real you.” That is why I am such a sucker for Indian movies, especially Telugu movies.
One of my favorites was called Nuvvu Naaku Nachav (which roughly translates into “I Like You”). Now, I can’t defend this choice on intellectual grounds. It chronicles the fairly routine journey of a slacker who moves in with his father’s rich best friend. His father hopes that he’ll finally learn some discipline, get a job, and so forth. The romantic center of the story is the slacker’s relationship with the rich guy’s daughter. It has its moments. What can I say?
It turns out that the heroine was played by an Indian American actress by the name of Aarthi Agarwal, who was in her late teens. Her parents were fairly rich businesspeople, operating out of New Jersey. Apparently, after a failed turn at Bollywood (North Indian) films, she went south. Looking back, she really appeared more mature than her age. But that was an illusion.
While she lived happily ever after in the movie, her real life was, by most accounts, a sad affair. Despite an early high, her career began to flatline towards the late 2000s. Her films would routinely flop, and, soon, the offers stopped coming. She survived a suicide attempt after a failed relationship with a fellow actor. Soon afterwards, she briefly married an Indian American techie, then they divorced. Given the heavy burdens that the movie industry puts on women, her growing weight became a liability. She slowly disappeared from the scene.
Perhaps in an attempt to reenter the film business, she underwent a liposuction procedure. Respiratory complications led to cardiac arrest and, ultimately, her demise. She died in Atlantic City at the age of 31. She died in Atlantic City at the age of 31.
The tragedy of child actors is neither new nor is it solely endemic to the Indian film industry. How senseless it is that these children are pushed into high-stress situations and largely left to themselves when anxiety and depression follow.
While I do not know all the facts associated with this particular case, it appears to follow an all-too-familiar pattern in Asian American life. At 16, she was talent-scouted by an established Indian actor in Philadelphia and encouraged to join the film industry. The whole thing must have had a whirlwind quality to it. The idea of a kid being tossed into the big money game of movies seems like it would have been too much to endure. But she made a name for herself in Telugu films and had a very successful run before the tide turned.
Asian women are hit especially hard by mental health issues. While their suicide rates might be lower than the national average, they ideate and suffer far more than their comparison groups. In the words of JY Lee, “they suffer more but they endure more. It’s worth quoting at length the abstract of a medical study:
“Our findings suggest that the participants experienced multiple types of “disempowering parenting styles” that are characterized as: abusive, burdening, culturally disjointed, disengaged, and gender-prescriptive parenting. Tied to these family dynamics is the double bind that participants suffer. Exposed to multiple types of negative parenting, the women felt paralyzed by opposing forces, caught between a deep desire to satisfy their parents’ expectations as well as societal expectations and to simultaneously rebel against the image of “the perfect Asian woman.” Torn by the double bind, these women developed a “fractured identity,” which led to the use of “unsafe coping” strategies. Trapped in a “web of pain,” the young women suffered alone and engaged in self-harm and suicidal behaviors.”
Ultimately, I think we all killed her. This is not some melodramatic Christian phrasing of the situation. We, the audience, created this giant beast that takes young people in on one end and spits them out, used and broken, on the other. Parents, producers, and everyone else respond in kind: “What do I care? I’ve had my delusional fantasies play out on the silver screen.”
