A Letter to the dead…and the living!
The country lost a great actor today, but why do I feel it so personally, I am just one of his million fans who have not even watched all of his movies yet.
In fact, I don’t even remember watching any of his movies before Life of Pi, and in that he has enacted his role so personally and delivered the dialogues so eloquently that it felt that the guy whom we saw for the most part of the film, struggling in the sea, running in perpetual confusion, was really his younger self! Then I saw The Lunchbox and even though I couldn’t understand the movie completely I still really liked his part. I think there are some movies which can never be completely understood or each time we watch them, we understand it from a different angle which he has not noticed the last time we watched. And I think that’s why those movies go beyond time and space and the actors become legends. He has done many such movies to garner him the ‘legend’ title, including Life of Pi, The Lunchbox, Haider, and Maqbool, the last one being my favorite. When I saw Maqbool I was just flabbergasted by the finery of his art and his brilliance. There are some artworks that you just can’t get out of as soon as it finishes or stops, because you are overwhelmed by it and it takes a while to fade away. And he himself was one such artwork!
Even his not-so-legendary characters in movies like Hindi Medium, Angrezi Medium, Qarib Qarib Singlle, and Karwaan never failed to give us a glimpse of the fine artist that he was and that he never needed to be the typical Bollywood hero and rescue a damsel in distress to leave his mark in the movie and get himself noticed. In fact, in some of these, he did the exact opposite or at least tried hard to do so!
When I started recognizing him, I always used to take note of his weird, frog-like eyes and laugh to myself about it. It was later when I started understanding the art behind the cinema that I realized that big eyes never fail to cast a spell, either in reel life or real!
Maybe that’s why his loss feels so real, so personal. Through his work, he taught us that if your work is real and you are doing it with honesty, you will keep getting new and exciting work that may or may not be commercial but will have a sense of meaning at the least. Maybe that’s why, it feels like most of India heartily mourns him, even though his near and dear ones also couldn’t be present at his last rites!