Dharmendra’s death feels different. Not only because we have lost a man who embodied a gentler, unembarrassed masculinity, but also because the nation rehearsed his passing a few weeks too early. While he was fighting for his life in the ICU, people were already posting their obituaries, circulating nostalgia playlists, and drafting heartfelt essays for a tragedy that hadn’t yet happened. It was as if we were impatient with the pace of mortality, eager to skip to the end.
Now that the news is real, we are caught in an odd emotional deficit. The genuine grief feels diluted, pre-spent, used up during the false alarm. Dharmendra is gone, but the country grieved him in advance—and that premature mourning says more about us than about him.
This is the modern pathology: We kill celebrities not out of hatred but out of anticipation. We pre-announce their exits the way previous generations reserved crockery for special occasions. A celebrity enters an ICU, and the internet quietly enters obituary mode. The desire is not to deceive; it is to feel ahead of time.
Dharmendra was never a Morgan Freeman—not a serial victim of internet hoaxes. What happened to him was subtler and more revealing. When news of his deteriorating health spread, people rushed to write tributes “just in case”. It wasn’t misinformation; it was “early grief”, the emotional equivalent of arriving too early at a funeral and standing awkwardly in an empty hall.
Sociologists might say we are a civilisation exhausted by continuity. Everything drags on endlessly now—political dramas, cinematic universes, influencer lives, streaming shows with unnecessary seasons. Nothing ends neatly. But death still does. It gives us clean lines, decisive punctuation. A celebrity’s passing offers the kind of closure modern life refuses to, and we crave that closure so desperately that we begin anticipating it.
Psychology offers a more intimate explanation. We kill celebrities early because we cannot bear their ageing. Dharmendra represented a version of India that has quietly evaporated—a kind of large-hearted heroism, unselfconscious charm, and emotional sincerity that no influencer culture can replicate. Watching such figures grow frail unsettles us. Their decline threatens our myths. So, we try to freeze them in the sepia form we prefer, by imaginatively writing the ending before life does.
And then there is the Instagram generation. Not just the young—but also the even more enthusiastic older cohort who think mastering reels is a sign of youthfulness. This new tribe has transformed mourning into content. They produce “aesthetic grief”, complete with retro filters, slow-motion Dharmendra clips, and soundtrack-ready sorrow. When he was in the ICU, many had tribute posts ready, paused like drafts in a newsroom. Grief used to be private; now it is curated, templated, optimised.
This performance of mourning collapses the boundary between anticipation and event. The moment a celebrity falls ill, a parallel market of pseudo-memorials springs into action. Not out of cruelty, but out of a compulsive need to be early—early to post, early to feel, early to perform sadness.
Meanwhile, newsrooms have discovered that mortality is the most clickable emotion. Even without declaring Dharmendra dead, channels and portals leaned into a tone of solemn countdown: “Serious condition”, “family worried”, “sources uncertain”. Some of them killed him prematurely, some rehearsed it. Because nothing spikes viewer engagement like imminent tragedy. Journalism has quietly acquired the instincts of a mortuary attendant checking the clock.
But Dharmendra’s actual passing breaks the performance. Suddenly the nostalgia feels too curated, the tributes too rehearsed, the grief too pre-packaged. When the real moment arrived, it had to compete with its own rehearsal.
India loved Dharmendra because he was that rare star who made heroism look human. His death hits not because he was a celebrity, but because he was an era. And perhaps that is why his final weeks exposed our cultural impatience so starkly. We no longer know how to let icons age quietly, or to allow their final days the dignity of uncertainty. We demand narrative certainty even before life is done writing.
In the end, the tragedy isn’t that we mourned Dharmendra too early; it is that we didn’t know how to let him live fully in his final days—without speculation, without content, without algorithmic breathlessness.
He is gone now. And for once, there is no rehearsal. Just the silence he deserved all along.
(The author is a senior advisory professional)
First Published: Nov 25, 2025, 14:10
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