Legendary adman Piyush Pandey passed away on October 24. Many industry celebs mourned his demise and one also saw Amitabh Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan attend his funeral. Ila Arun is Piyush Pandey’s sister and as videos from the funeral got viral, both Ila and her daughter Ishitta Arun were trolled for laughing during this time. One had seen them laughing and chatting and Ishita hit back at trolls as she responded to them on social media. She took to her Instagram and wrote, “Grief isn’t a single script. And when you’re saying goodbye to a man who laughed louder than anyone else, remembering him through laughter isn’t disrespect. It’s continuity. It’s muscle memory. It’s knowing who he really was. What you saw was us laughing at his line- a line only he could deliver. If you had known him, even in passing, you wouldn’t have needed this explained.”Ishitta added further, “We don’t stage grief. We don’t mute memory to make strangers comfortable. We remember him honestly- as laughter, courage, and life itself. Next time-know the story before you comment on the moment.” Now in an interview, Ishita has opened up more on the reason why they seemed so normal as her ‘mama’ passed away. She told Hindustan Times, “As a society, we tend to attach emotions to certain prescribed behaviours. If you’re not crying, then you must not be grieving. If you don’t display something a certain way, then you must not be feeling it. This comes from a deeply ingrained, and often unexamined, mentality — one that is far more common across our cultural landscape than we like to admit. It isn’t limited to grief. It shows up in many aspects of Indian social conditioning. The simplest expression of it has always been, ‘Log kya kahenge?’ these are those very 4 log.”She further spoke about their bond with her ‘mama’ and said that he would have been worried if he saw his sisters sad. She said, “When we bid him goodbye, we sang Mile Sur Mera Tumhara – we cheered for mama, and we promised each other that the next time we gather, it will be in a better, lighter setting. He was always the life of the party, and that spirit stayed with us. All of us, in our own way, could hear his commentary in our heads – that familiar tone. Some of the things we did, he would have looked at and said, ‘Bakwas hai.’ And that made us smile through the heaviness. He would also have been the first to worry about his elder sisters – all in their seventies now – and whether they would slip into sadness. I’m genuinely glad that my aunts and my mother dressed up, showed up, and held themselves with dignity. That is not vanity, that is health. That is continuity. And they are allowed that grace. There are far more real things to focus on than how grief should look.” While describing the family’s bond she quotes Piyush’s iconic line, “As for our family – Fevicol ka jod hai. Tootega nahi.”While one may blame social media for this sort of scrutiny into someone’s personal life and emotions, Ishita feels that it’s just the general mindset of society. “Social media hasn’t created this mindset, it has simply made it more visible. Earlier, the same commentary happened within drawing rooms and family circles – now it is just typed out loud The constant policing of how to sit, how to speak, how to feel — the quiet, everyday judgement that shapes how so many people move through the world,” she said.
