Not just actresses, it’s a dream for most of the girls to be a Sabya bride one day. Even though India’s renowned celebrity designer, Sabyasachi Mukherjee has been having his moments of fame and success in recent past but there was a time when he suffered from severe depression!
Earlier this year, Sabya faced a lot of flak on his post about ‘overdressed women’. Quoting Ms. Havisham from Great Expectations, he wrote in one of his posts, ‘“If you see a woman ‘overdressed’, caked with makeup, armoured with jewellery, it is most likely that she is wounded. Bleeding inside, silently. Holding on to her pride and dignity, shining for the world, though within her innermost being there is a dark blinding pain. Take some time to give her your precious company, heal her with your empathy, because nothing can replace human warmth. Not even the most precious of jewellery.”
His post was termed ‘sexist, misogynistic and wasn’t taken well by the audience. Owing to this fiasco, he issued an apology where he clarified that it wasn’t his intentional at all. He further explained that he had worked in this industry for over 20 years and he had firsthand experienced some women indulging in ‘retail therapy’ to fill the gaps and voids in their lives. Check out his apology post below:
Sabyasachi with Rani Mukerji and Deepika Padukone
In a recent interview with a leading news daily, the designer opened up about his demons, self-doubt and his battle with depression. He revealed that he tried committing suicide at the age of 17. “I got into severe depression when I was 17. I tried committing suicide. It was a failed attempt. Mental health in today’s day and time, with this quick pace of life, is becoming more pronounced. And people need to understand that it is not something that one needs to be ashamed of or fear because it’s quite normal. And we need to just address it as normally as possible.”
Reminiscing his initial years, the ace designer revealed, “I think a lot of us creative people suffer from a lack of self-expression. (At the time) I was a creative person in the wrong education stream. I was studying medicine, then economics, wasn’t very sure what I would do.”
This time put Mukherjee in a very dark place. However, it was his radical dressing that came to his rescue. “Self-expression helped me cope with the frustrations of not being able to find a creative outlet, I started expressing myself by dyeing my hair orange and wearing ripped jeans with safety pins on them, inspired by Madonna,” he said.
Sabya said that what pushed him to the edge was the lack of support system. “I think the big stigma that happens to most people comes from isolation where people think I’m probably the only one who’s going through it. But when you reach out to a community you realize you’re not. I think right now there is a lot of conversation happening on mental health and everybody can find their community, sometimes if not offline, then definitely online," he continued.
Speaking about whether he still faces the moments of depression, Mukerjee told they aren’t as severe as they used to be, thanks to his creative and fulfilling job. “It (depressive episodes) doesn’t happen to me anymore. I have too creative and too fulfilling a job.” When asked how he copes and deals with the rare episodes of self-doubts, the designer replied. “Food! I’m Bengali, we love eating. And a little bit of extra sleep just picks me up," he added.
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However, it wasn’t the first time when the celebrated designer opened up about his depression and an attempt to commit suicide. At an event in 2017, Sabya compared his occurrence of depression to the common cold. “I was depressed, and I tried to kill myself. I was unconscious, and my mom gave me a slap. I was sad at moving to a new place. Moving from Chandannagar to Kolkata was like moving from the suburbs to Paris. Depression is as common as common cold. If you’re not depressed, you’re not normal."
"My depression gave me a lot of clarity. Had I not been depressed, India would’ve lost me to some company called Google, in San Francisco,” he added.
(Source- ET Panache, India Today)
