“I had actually attempted suicide,” Kailash Kher recounts his journey from darkness to light

Being an artist or a performer or being any kind of a public figure is always a pressure. Also, when you reach a certain point in your career, when you are somewhat successful, then the competition around you starts to get serious. Har kisiko chaand milta nehi, chahat sabko hai. Either you learn to be content with what you have, or slowly a kind of depression seeps in. Maybe artists, since they are usually a more sensitive lot, are more susceptible to this kind of depression. I have also faced many such lows and disappointments that have led to depression, sometimes of a severe kind. But, having said that, I also think depression is a very heavy duty word that we often use lightly these days. Everybody has problems and disappointments; we can’t insulate ourselves from sadness. It is a part of us.

“It is not that today I don’t get sad or depressed, of course I do. But I immerse myself in my music and all the pain slowly disappears. You have to let yourself get consumed by your passion, and then these ups and downs will not impact you that much”

But, I must confess this is a newfound wisdom. There was a time I had actually attempted suicide. We live in a society where if you are not good at studies you are usually never taken seriously. But I always wanted to do music and studies never interested me . So, there was this constant tug of war going on between my passion and the expectations of people around me. At one point this inner conflict and turmoil became so severe that I thought of ending my life. I thought I was not fit for this world, and this world is not for me. I had jumped into the Ganges end all my misery. But thankfully I got saved by a friend. Else, nobody would have know this person called Kailash Kher. At the most, maybe I would have made it to some obscure tiny corner of some local newspaper as another suicide victim.

It is not that today I don’t get sad or depressed, of course I do. But I immerse myself in my music and all the pain slowly disappears. You have to let yourself get consumed by your passion, and then these ups and downs will not impact you that much.

I think patience is the name of the game. There will be times when it will seem that you are drowning in the quicksand of sorrow, that there is no hope. It will feel like nothing good can ever happen after this. But know it for a fact that har raat ke baad ek savera zaroor hai.

(As told to Ananya Ghosh)

From HT Brunch, June 30, 2018

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