Why a Personal Loss

After a very long time, India is united on a topic, there are no debates and camps to serve our biases on this issue. All of us feel the same...

The death of a true artist is the ultimate and final work he produces in his oeuvre. Only then we realise the value of what we lost. The personal experience which was felt yesterday by millions of us was similar to and the result of what we felt subconsciously through his work which also has some traces outside the cinematic world.

Do you remember the advertisements of Envy 1000 featuring Irrfan with all his self-conscious satire on commercial narratives of deodorants which fed on our inferiority complexes?

Advertisement at best shows societies changing patterns and the first decade of the new Millenium, realism was seeping in our veins and Irrfan is surely one of the torchbearers.

Great artists are sieves through which the zeitgeist sifts its dreams, joys and fears. Irrfan Khan was one such artist in post-liberalized India. His realistic and nonchalant way countered our fantasized anxieties and insecurities which capitalism shoved into our throats.
His brand of work shows his ability to find something fun, something exciting in the ordinary. By this, he showed happiness need not be found in grand things and his nonchalance stated that you don't have to be a genius to know it. While the mainstream culture was driving our desires on seductive materials, he was making us fall in love with our lives as they are.

Here is another one of CEAT Tyres with all his light everyman terse on our superstitious fears -

The Shikanji joke, at last, at best sums up Irrfan. Something as mundane and identifiable from our real lives has the value of being a part of a commercial narrative which is enjoyable.

We see something different happening on screen when Irrfan sells something. We surely know that Varun Dhawan or Akshay Kumar doesn't wear LUX COZY vest or DOLLAR underwear. The ads. are made on the presumption that we are infatuated by the star.
When we see Irrfan on the screen, It also sells because of the stardom that he carries, but in this case, the constituents of stardom are entirely different, the presumption is of the authenticity and the identifying factors of an ordinary man and that's what our realist zeitgeist consist of.
The middle-class aspirations in Eddlewiess Tokyo loan, our sexual inferiority complexes in ENVY 1000 and our financial pangs of high tariffs in Vodafone (Hutch at that time).
He connected with us by our anxieties, with driving humour from the resonating mundaneness of it.
Just look at how he spices up the realistic humour in our regular events
(Aapke Saath Bhi to Aisa Hota Hoga!)

At that time these were new perspectives. Now that the colloquial laconic is marketable, SYSSKA LED uses it. In fact, at present Realism has turned into a marketing gimmick in all of our media culture, still being safe in a few rightful hands. That's for some other post altogether.

Champak (Angrezi Medium), Pi Patel (Life of Pie), Shaukat (Kaarwaan)

Moving to Irrfan's greater contributions, his characters and the lives he gave to them beyond their writing with his marvellous improvisations.
He made us feel that we knew the characters he played. Be it stoic goon and ganglord like Ranvijay Singh (Haasil) and Yusuf Pathan (Aan), the men of duty and justice like Roshan (New York) and Ashwin (Talwar), the seductive manipulating evilness of Roohdar (Haidar), the loving terseness of Shaukat (Kaarwaan) and Raj (Hindi medium) or the great vulnerabilities of Billu (Billu Barber), Dev (Blackmail) and Saajan Fernandez (The Lunchbox).
We felt every bit of every character.

They have something in common, they have no personal great desires and aspiration and no great obstacles standing between them which they had to overcome by the end of the plot. Most of his characters are existential and stuck in their respective predicaments or have humble and ordinary aspirations. And mostly getting together the situations which are falling apart from their meagre control. And that's the part we connect to.

Roshan (New York), Ashwin (Talwar), Raj (Hindi Medium)

At least these characters want to mend things in the right direction (at which they mostly fail at achieving completely and satisfy themselves with a bargain) - Roshan (New York), Ashwin (Talwar), Raj (Hindi Medium).
Even in Hindi Medium Raj did go to all that extent not because he wanted her daughter to study in an uptown school. But because he wanted to give whatever the girl desires whom he loves the most. And at last, ended up in a bargain.

Nirmal (Madaari), Ranvijay (Haasil), Dev (Blackmail)

And at most they fall in the dark side and snatch and take whatever they are obsessed about and the world hasn't given them.
The revenge out of the dreadful loss of Nirmal (Madaari), the violent acts motivated by his inferiority complexes as Ranvijay (Haasil), the sadomasochism of Wassiullah Khan (7 Khoon Maaf) and absurdist humour on Dev out of his corporate drone like vulnerabilities (Blackmail).

Billu (Billu Barber), Saajan (The Lunchbox)

And sometimes -at his best- they are just powerless to the situations and sway to those currents of predicaments.
Billu didn't have any deep personal desire to meet Sahil khan and Saajan Fernandez had lost all hopes that his solitude would ever end. Their character goes wherever situations lead them without any control.


Here's what Adil Hussain wrote...

Only an actor honest to his craft would have said this, he is surely one of them.

We knew all of those characters through a vessel of a single physical body and it's movements. And I think that's what makes the loss so personal, more than desiring to be like these characters we rather identified with them, with their fears, their confusions, their vulnerabilities. We identified to all those people through that single person, and we lost all of them (and those who might have come in future) by losing that single person.

While we all share our desires of living our dreams like Bunny (YJHD) and finding love like Aaditya (Jab We Met).
But we share our confusions and vulnerabilities with kinds of character which Irrfan plays with his well crafted and effortful yet seeming effortless acts.

We don't desire to have a life like that of Saajan or Dev. We don't want to get angry as Ranvijay does. Because we already are living those bits in our lives, more than desiring them, we resonate with them and his characters make us accept ourselves wholeheartedly.

It's not that Irrfan is the only one who does that, but he is arthouse's best gift to the mainstream. His stardom was established in 2014 when Haidar came in theatres, the entry of a side character of Roohdaar garnered whistles and shouts similar to that of the entry of Khan triumvirate. He is a great actor who achieved the status of a star. That was the point of time when people have fully accepted and started loving him, they predicted that if he is on the screen they are gonna again feel all those joys and fears and anxieties in their identifiable ordinariness. This was a shift in the zeitgeist.

Roohdaar (Haidar)

If in any manner, you want to pay tribute or honour this man and his work, you should be an active receiver of his work, you should be able to understand the nuances of his craft because there is so much more to delve into.

His passing away was like a blow torch at the back of the paper which made the lime juice painting visible which was always there yet unnoticed. (guess the reference).


- Ujjwal Narayan