The recent demise of Ms. Misha Agarwal, a social media influencer, has sent shockwaves across the internet. The young entrepreneur, who tragically passed away by suicide on April 24, 2025, a mere two days prior to her 25th birthday, leaves behind a poignant narrative regarding the pervasive influence of social media on the lives of young individuals.
In a formal announcement posted on Ms. Agarwal’s Instagram account, her bereaved family confirmed the heartbreaking news of her passing. Subsequently, six days later, a deeply emotional disclosure on the same platform illuminated the underlying factors that contributed to this devastating event. The post revealed that Ms. Agarwal’s existence had become inextricably linked with her pursuit of a significant milestone on Instagram: amassing one million followers. The family further shared the distressing reality that a decline in her follower count precipitated feelings of profound worthlessness and despair in the young creator. Reinforcing this revelation, they included a screenshot of her mobile phone wallpaper, starkly displaying her aspiration to achieve this digital popularity, underscoring the extent to which this goal had consumed her thoughts and aspirations.

Ms. Misha Agarwal’s educational background

Despite her professional accomplishments as a law graduate and her preparations for the Provincial Civil Services Judicial Examination (PCSJ), Ms. Agarwal evidently struggled to reconcile the pressures of maintaining a prominent online presence with her personal well-being. While her content resonated with a wide audience, few were privy to the internal turmoil and emotional distress she endured behind the curated facade of her social media persona. An older video of Ms. Agarwal, now circulating online, poignantly reveals her struggles with self-hate and a deep-seated fear of abandonment, offering a glimpse into her underlying vulnerabilities.

More than an internet personality
Beyond her influencer status, Ms. Agarwal was the driving force behind Misha Cosmetics, a brand recognized for its focus on hair care products and beauty advice disseminated through its dedicated social media account. Following her passing, the brand’s page issued a confirmation of the news, assuring customers that pending orders would be fulfilled, a testament to Ms. Agarwal’s commitment to her entrepreneurial venture.
The tragic circumstances surrounding Ms. Agarwal’s death serve as a stark reminder of the profound impact social media experts on contemporary youth. The incident underscores the potential for these platforms to become sources of validation to an unhealthy degree, blurring the lines between online representation and lived reality. Her family’s heartfelt message explicitly addressed this concern, stating with solemnity, “Instagram is not a real world and followers are not real love, please try to understand this.” Their plea urges young individuals to adopt a more discerning perspective, viewing these platforms as a form of entertainment rather than allowing them to dictate their sense of self-worth and consume their lives entirely.
The untimely loss of Ms. Agarwal highlights the critical need for increased awareness regarding the psychological implications of social media engagement and the importance of fostering a balanced and realistic understanding of online interactions.

With Thunderbolts* (the asterisk denotes a little something that’s worth ceasing all phones at early screenings), Marvel Studios offers a strange something. Not a new beginning, not even an end, but a reluctant middle piece to its dwindling self-worth nearing the conclusion of Phase-5. After a decade-plus of spandex operatics, cosmic showdowns, and multiversal migraines, we’ve arrived at the era of mid-tier misfits and discards. The Avengers are either dead, de-aged, or trapped in development hell. The remaining bench is a set of weary characters staring down the abyss of their own irrelevance. 

A former child assassin, a disgraced Captain America knockoff, a super-assassin turned congressman, a haunted quantum blur, a Soviet relic, and a human emotional contagion named Bob. They’ve been shelved, sidelined, and mostly forgotten — by their government handlers, by the world they supposedly saved, and, most damningly, by their jaded audiences who’ve long since moved on. What throws Thunderbolts* a lifeline in the slow, defibrillator rhythm of a post-Endgame Marvel is that Kevin Feige has finally started to admit that the party might just be over. 

Once a promising successor to her late sister Natasha Romanoff’s Black Widow, Florence Pugh returns as Yelena Belova, still mourning her sister, still drolly Russian, and still the Phase-5’s most emotionally legible performer. She wears her disillusionment like a second skin and her job is no longer to avenge, but to merely trudge along begrudgingly, and that’s proving more difficult by the day. “Maybe I’m just bored,” she says early on, which feels like a discerning summation of the post-Endgame age.Thunderbolts* doesn’t solve that problem. But it does acknowledge it with unusual clarity, and that alone makes it one of Marvel’s more human efforts in years.

Director Jake Schreier (of Robot & Frank and the 2015 adapatation of John Green’s Paper Towns) brings a light indie touch to the proceedings. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in the convoluted lore or flashy pyrotechnica of modern superhero fare, and instead, lets his cast rattle around in desaturated corridors and puts them in vulnerable spots. No one could reinvent the MCU at this point, but he does subtly redirect it.

The plot, as is often the case, is the weakest link. CIA head honcho Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose dry wit is underserved by the script) tricks our assorted antiheroes into a mission that’s really a death trap. One by one, they realise they’ve been sent to eliminate each other, and we soon get a slow-burn mutiny of sad-eyed soldiers who would rather hug it out than throw punches, at least most of the time.

A still from ‘Thunderbolts*’
| Photo Credit:
MARVEL STUDIOS

David Harbour’s Red Guardian continues his grumpy dad routine with winning goofiness. He gets some of the film’s funniest lines (Yelena’s pee-wee soccer team becomes an ongoing source of oddly affecting pride), but his real role is to tether the film’s sky-high gloom to something earthbound and foolishly tender. Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes also reappears, with a more grounded gravitas that reminds you he once had a more engaging storyline. Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, still festering from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, scowls his way through a majority of the film, and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost remains half-formed, but that feels appropriate — her power is literally to phase in and out. And Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster… well.

These are characters stuck in a kind of cinematic purgatory. They’re not quite important enough for franchise salvation, but not disposable enough to be killed off. They’re the narrative flotsam of past installments, with enough courage to question what actually happens to a superhero deferred. The action is competent but rarely thrilling and the colour palette leans hard on shadows and grime. But amid the industrial drabness, a freshness takes form and the characters begin to breathe.

The new wildcard is Lewis Pullman’s Bob, a fragile, mumbling superbeing with the power to make people feel the worst thing about themselves. That his supposedly omnipotent abilities are practically weaponised depression is quite telling. When he loses control, he becomes a living fog of despair, swallowing blocks of Manhattan in shapeless, shadowy grief. It’s a heavy metaphor, but Pullman sells it with a twitchy, wounded sincerity. Bob is the first Marvel character in ages who seems genuinely surprised (and a little terrified) to be in a Marvel movie.

A still from ‘Thunderbolts*’
| Photo Credit:
MARVEL STUDIOS

It’s actually through Bob that Thunderbolts* achieves its most ambitious emotional swing. This rag-tag group of “disposable delinquents” isn’t trying to stop a bad guy so much as stop being the bad guys, and their arcs aren’t driven by fate or destiny, but by therapy-adjacent self-reflection. In the end, it all leads back to Yelena, whose sardonic emotional register makes her a compelling nucleus. Pugh’s performance builds momentum in silence and she’s the only one in the ensemble who seems to understand that the real villain is disconnection.

It’s messy, meandering, and emotionally lopsided, but Thunderbolts* feels like it was made by people who wanted to be there. That’s more than can be said for most Marvel projects in recent memory. That Thunderbolts* feels like a minor miracle in the post-Endgame MCU is less a credit to the film itself than a damning verdict on the films that came before it. It’s a modest movie, practically allergic to MCU chutzpah, and yet it succeeds where so many others have failed.

Thunderbolts* is currently running in theatres

A pall of gloom hangs over ‘Piravi’, Shaji N Karun’s residence in Thiruvananthapuram. This was where the auteur and ace cinematographer met admirers from all walks of life. This is where he had conceptualised all his works, including documentaries and short films. This is where I met Shaji more than three decades ago as a student of journalism as part of my course. He had shared that it was his wife Anusuya Warrier’s idea to name their house ‘Piravi’.

Shaji spent considerable time speaking to a rookie reporter, discussing his maiden film Piravi (1988), his second film Swaham (1994) and his student days in Pune. Piravi , a huge success, was about the story of a father’s futile search for his son, who has been picked up by the police. The film brought alive the excesses during the Emergency, in a poignant way. It won Shaji the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989 and the National award for best director along with several other honours from across the world. Swaham (1994) was also screened at Cannes.

It was Shaji’s fascination for the images painted by light that made him take to cinematography. After his graduating in Physics from University College, he chose to join the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. He passed out with a gold medal in cinematography.

Shaji always spoke passionately about the magic and moods of the tropical sun. He would excitedly capture its constantly changing hues and direction. His attention to detail was amazing.

His simplicity was in stark contrast to the world he saw through the lens. Since he lived in the neighbourhood of my mother’s house, I have often seen him walk quietly along the road. He was then the chairman of the Kerala State Chalachitra Academy. He was also the executive chairman of the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). He was able to get the best of filmmakers and technicians to these festivals because of his personal equation with them.

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to speak to him several times. Each time, I was left with a sense of wonder at the filmmaker’s ability to delve into varied themes set in different periods of times. Shaji was not a prolific director. He took time to shape a story or a theme and then spent some more time visualising it in a language and idiom that was all his.

Among the many awards that Shaji had won, he particularly treasured the Sir Charlie Chaplin Award instituted to commemorate the birth centenary of the legendary comic actor (1989) at the Edinburgh Film Festival. “After I boarded my flight to India, the flight attendants announced that I had won this prestigious award and the passengers gave me a standing ovation,” he had recounted during an interview to The Hindu.

Artist Namboothiri and filmmaker Shaji N Karun
at the release of the documentary, Varayude Klapathy
| Photo Credit:
THULASI KAKKAT

Shaji’s deep affinity for music and painting was evident in all his films. His bond with artist Namboothiri resulted in the documentary Neruvara on the latter’s life. Moving Focus – A Voyage captured the artist KG Subramanyam’s journey. The free-flowing lines and strokes were beautifully translated onto the screen by Shaji.

He had stepped into the world of cinema by cranking the camera for KP Kumaran’s Lakshmi Vijayam (1976). But it was his long association with G. Aravindan that marked his cinematographic oeuvre. Kanchana Sita (1977), Thampu (1978), Kummatty (1979), Esthappan (1979), Pokkuveyil (1981), Chidambaram, Oridathu and Unni were all filmed by him. He had an uncanny ability to understand what Aravindan had in mind. Shaji was able to transform Aravindan’s abstract ideas into perfectly composed frames. “Aravindan’s screenplay was often very brief. Thampu, for instance, had only four pages,” he had recalled during the screening of the film’s restored version in Cannes.

He had also worked with other great directors such as P. Padmarajan, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, K.G. George and Lenin Rajendran. He was the cinematographer of writer-director Padmarajan’s Koodevide, which marked actor Suhasini’s debut in Malayalam films.

Paying tribute to Shaji, Suhasini had shared on Instagram: “Remembering Shaji Karun. Some people we meet are evergreen and eternal. He was the cinematographer for my debut film Koodevide. I was his Subhadra in Vanaprastham. A true artiste and a great human. People like him made our industry safe and marvellous for newcomers. Will miss him…”

Mohanlal in Vanaprastham, which isamong Shaji’s timeless classics
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

In Vanaprastham (1999), Shaji’s third feature film, Mohanlal came up with an award-winning performance as a poverty-stricken Kathakali performer and his inner struggle as an artiste and man.

Kutty Srank (2010) remains one of the most complex films of Shaji. It traced the past life of a dead Chavittunatakan artiste and the different memories he left behind in the places he had lived. Blurring reality and fiction, Shaji’s story in a sense was also the story of certain regions of the State and the arrival of different faiths and belief systems. Mammotty effortlessly played the three avatars of Kutty Srank and his relationship with three women.

Shaji had once said that Mohanlal’s large expressive eyes was his biggest advantage while Mammootty was so handsome that it was difficult to mask his good looks. “Even if one were to smear his face with soil, it would difficult to hide his features.”

From the movie Swaapanam.
| Photo Credit:
The Hindu Archives

After Swaapanam and Olu, Shaji’s heartfelt desire was to direct a musical. He had said how disappointed he was when a top actor, who had received several awards for his work in Shaji’s films, had come up with all kinds of excuses to not work in the musical. It was to have been a mega Indo-European project.

With Shaji’s passing, Malayalam cinema has lost a director and technician who elevated it to global standards. I recently watched Vanaprastham on television and experienced the meditative pace at which Shaji’s camera captured every nuance of emotion. It reflected Shaji’s approach to life — observing and enjoying every moment in quietude.