Another name, another link, another burial. Pravina Deshpande is dead at 60. If you’ve spent any time scrolling the breathless, ad-choked sidebars of the Indian internet today, you already know the hook. She wasn’t just an actress; she was "Salman Khan’s Ready co-star."

It’s a brutal way to go. Not the death itself—though 60 is a raw deal by any actuarial standard—but the SEO-ification of a life’s work. Deshpande spent decades in the trenches. She did the theater grind. She did the Marathi television circuit. She was a professional who showed up, hit her marks, and played the roles that make a scene feel like a room instead of a green-screen void. But in the cold, unfeeling eyes of the Google Discover feed, her entire existence is being boiled down to a 13-year-old action-comedy that most critics treated like a migraine set to music.

That’s the friction of the modern legacy. You don't die as a person anymore. You die as an adjacency.

Deshpande’s passing was confirmed by her family, though the details of the cause remain the kind of private business the internet hates. The digital machinery doesn't care about the how as much as it cares about the who-else. In this case, that "who-else" is Salman Khan. It’s a cynical trade-off. To get the masses to notice your exit, you have to be tethered to a megastar. If she hadn't shared a frame with the biggest name in Bollywood back in 2011, this news would be a footnote in a regional trade paper. Instead, it’s a trending topic.

The industry is built on this kind of parasitic recognition. Think about the pay gap for a second. In a production like Ready, the lead actor’s vanity costs more than the entire supporting cast’s combined lifetime earnings. We’re talking about a system where a character actress might pull in a few thousand rupees a day while the star’s security detail eats through a budget that could fund a dozen indie films. Deshpande was part of that invisible middle class of the arts. They aren't the ones on the billboards, but they are the ones who actually make the story move while the star is busy being a brand.

Her career wasn't a fluke. She was a fixture in the Marathi entertainment world, a space that values craft over six-pack abs. But the algorithm doesn't reward craft. It rewards keywords. And "Pravina Deshpande" is a weak keyword. "Salman Khan," however, is gold. So we get these headlines that act like digital glue, sticking a dignified woman’s passing to a superstar’s shadow just to squeeze a few more cents out of a programmatic ad buy.

It’s enough to make you wonder why anyone bothers with the "artist" tag anymore. We’re all just metadata in waiting.

There’s a specific kind of cruelty in being remembered for your least essential work. Deshpande had range. She had the stage. But the internet’s memory is only as deep as its most recent crawl. To the bots and the content farms, she is "Ready Co-Star." It’s a label that feels like a budget-bin sticker. It ignores the years of rehearsals, the skipped meals, the bad scripts she had to make sound good, and the sheer grit it takes to survive in an industry that discards women the moment they can no longer play the ingenue.

Sixty is a pivot point. It’s the age where theater actors usually find their second wind, playing the matriarchs and the power players with the kind of gravity only age provides. Instead, the story ends here. No more scenes. No more call times. Just a flurry of tweets and "RIP" posts from people who couldn't have picked her out of a lineup yesterday but are now mourning her as if she was their favorite aunt.

This isn't just about one actress. It’s about the way we consume human loss. We’ve outsourced our grief to the trending tab. We wait for the notification to tell us who mattered, and we measure that mattering by who they stood next to in a movie that came out during the first Obama administration. It’s a shallow way to honor a career.

The family will have their service. The industry will move on to the next "Remembering [X]" gallery. And the algorithm will keep churning, waiting for the next supporting player to drop so it can link them to someone with more followers.

If the digital afterlife is just a series of interconnected keywords, I hope she’s finally unsubscribed from the "Co-star" tag.

She probably deserved a headline that didn’t involve a man she worked with once.