From the Opinions Editor: The tragic death of Shefalee Jariwala and the anti-ageing trap

Indian Express

a day ago

Dear Express reader,
At some point, in give or take their forties, women are made aware that they are no longer the default setting: Not the protagonist of ads, not the statistical core of a marketing campaign, not, as Gen Z would say, giving main character energy. Instead, they become a certain kind of invisible — their demographic slides quietly off the cultural radar, and the world, with its fresh faces and optimised filters, keeps spinning.
The obsession with youth is not new. The Greeks built myths around it. The Renaissance painted it in oils. But the modern world industrialised it. Today, youth is no longer measured in years; it is a product category — rebranded, bottled, injected, and sold into an ideal so pervasive that even the act of resisting it must be done with the right serum, the right lighting, the right kind of denial.
Anti-ageing is a billion-dollar industry. In 2024, the global anti-ageing market was estimated to be worth $75.7 billion, according to a survey by market-research firm IMARC. In India, it reached $2.5 billion and is expected to grow to $4 billion by 2033. It sells creams that promise to reverse time, diets that speak in the language of miracles, and procedures that pledge a new you — less tired, less lived-in, necessarily idealised. Even language conspires to soften the blow of ageing, offering euphemisms like 'prejuvenation' to fix what isn't broken.
Shefalee Jariwala's death at 42 last week from a cardiac arrest — linked allegedly to anti-ageing treatments and an extreme diet – throws this into sharp relief. The actor, who came into the limelight with the remix of the song Kaanta laga, was reportedly fasting and on anti-ageing medication; an avid consumer of cosmetic drugs, she is said to have taken a Vitamin C IV drip on that fateful day as well. She was, in essence, a woman trying to stay visible in a culture that flits by once you are considered past the bill of 'acceptability'.
But what exactly do we mean by youth? Is it the physical resilience — the quick metabolism, the energy that never needs rationing, the sleepless nights that could be followed by 10-hour shifts at the workplace? Or, is it something more elusive: A sense of possibility, an unformedness that has not yet calcified into certainty? Youth, we are told, is when we are most alive. Which implies that ageing, in this cultural grammar, is a kind of dying.
What all of this betrays, of course, is a deep unease with the passage of time itself. We live in a culture allergic to impermanence. Where once age was a milestone – of experience, of wisdom — gleaned over a well-lived life, it is now treated as a letdown. This notion becomes especially cruel in midlife, when adulthood comes of age.
The body starts sending quiet memos, the mirror betrays a new flaccidity every time. Youth, in this equation, is no longer merely desirable — it becomes mandatory. So, like Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance, last year's breakaway body horror movie featuring Demi Moore, there is a relentless rush to experiment with new treatments to avoid the inevitability of hoariness. Names of substances such as Ozempic and glutathione, retinol and hyaluronic acid roll off the tongue with an ease that should be terrifying but only shows how steeped we are in this configuration of ourselves into a prospective upgrade.
No one tells you how to age. There's no consensus on how much of a fight you are meant to put up, nor a handbook for how to face the first intimations of mortality. The poet Dylan Thomas told us to 'rage, rage against the dying of the light' but he died young, spared the awkward choreography of ageing in public.
To age in the modern world is to perform a paradox. Women are expected to look ageless while pretending it is without effort. They must 'own' their years but not wear them too heavily. Ageing 'well' is fine as long as it is styled and shape-shifted into wellness routines and aesthetic enhancements, framed as 'self-care' over vanity or insecurity.
Jariwala's story is tragic, but not unfamiliar. Many women live some version of it, quietly calibrating their worth against their age. They don't always die from it. They simply lean into an erasure that comes from letting go of the person they were meant to grow into.
Take care,
Paromita