Remembering Irrfan Khan

Was it '87? '88? I was a young boy. There used to be a serial called Katha Sagar on DD -- which would show dramatised versions of short stories written by great writers of the world. Many of you would remember.

There was this Anton Chekhov story 'Ward No. 6' made into three episodes. The story was about a psychiatric doctor who befriends one of the patients in the madhouse (named 'Ward No. 6') because his ramblings would make more sense to him than the so-called sane people around him. The story traces the gradual degradation of the doctor's social standing, eventually landing him in the same ward.

A young adolescent, already struggling to find my standing in my circles, I was deeply affected by this story. The story was an insightful illustration of the fact that what's popular needn't be sensible, nor that what's sensible need to be accepted by the public. Somewhere, the growing child in me identified with those characters -- that doctor who had the intelligence and innocence to not blindly follow a popular judgement but listen to his own thoughts and even with that madman who talked sense. It gave me strength to believe that it's not necessary to agree with the majority to make sense. Secretly -- perhaps -- I had also pledged to myself that I wouldn't go down meekly like that doctor.

Even 30+ years ago, that lean actor with a run-down, deeply sad and intelligent look in his eyes who had played that role so beautifully, had caught my notice. I didn't know his name then and didn't try to find out either. And he remained lost for years after that, making sundry appearances here and there doing often nondescript rolls. It's only after he resurfaced and sky-rocketed into becoming a major star in the last 15 years or so that we came to know his name. He was Irrfan Khan -- the late bloomer.

Yesterday, we dug out those episodes on YouTube and watched them. At least to me, they touched me equally deeply even now. Added to that, the whole minimalism -- almost penury -- of the whole set-up affected me deeply. Those were the times when the actors and directors had nothing except the raw intensity of their performance to narrate a story with multiple layers. Nothing else than an Irrfan Khan could have essayed that role so completely. To me -- that schoolboy, Irrfan

was already a star even when he wasn't one.

To the ocean of tears that's been created in the last 24 hours by his billion fans, I join in with little drop of tribute. In lamenting his premature passing and the death of those innumerable roles that will never get played as only Irrfan could have.

News Channels, Movies and Books

I mostly do not watch TV. Well, sometimes I do. I flip lazily through movie channels (in search of a highly gory action scene or a sci-fi or fantasy scene), music channels (old movie songs, ghazals, bhajans), travel/cookery/documentary channels (some NatGeo documentary on space/physics/computers, or some fat chef cooking something unhealthy and delicious, or rich, beautiful women in skimpy clothes talking about spirituality and world welfare holidaying in expensive resorts in South Pacific where I will never go), entertainment channels (soap operas, reality shows, just as a preparation to switch off the TV).

In that order.

Mostly, a fairly cursory pass through all these channels exhausts the 15-20 minute window of mentally vegetative state that allow myself.

My behaviour while going over the newspaper is similar: I start with the glossy supplementaries, I feed my morbid side by lapping up a few items reporting suicides, murders, accidents, rapes and robberies. Then, past all news on international politics, commerce, sports ... I jump straight to the editorial page.

If I really have some time in hand and am looking to spend it with myself while enriching myself, I pick a book. If I want to watch a movie (I love movies), I get a DVD or go to a threatre. I don't find it worth trusting the movie channels to telecast the movies I would like to watch, where they decide the time, and also the number and duration of commercial breaks.

An interesting observation is: I don't remember myself ever having sauntered into one of the numerous news channels. Not even when looking for information. In the days of Doordarshan, I remember having sat through the 20 minutes newscast where the very beautiful, elegant and impersonal-faced Salma Sultan would monotonously read out headlines worded crisply, impartially and lifelessly. Though I was still a kid, I would appreciate that those newscasts were talking about something important. And though I was still a kid, I was grown up enough to admire Salma madam's beauty (of course, there were others: Manjari Sahay, Avinash Kaur, J P Raman, Ved Prakash ...)! But never in the current days do I remember having survived a single news channel show.

There's plenty said about how the news channels have become sensationalised, loud and biased. So, I will not go there. I will sign off by just mentioning that however much I rationalise with myself, I haven't been able to motivate myself to keep up with current affairs, particularly by the way of TV news or newspapers. I do pick up magazines like Frontline and India Today sometimes. But I find keeping up with the day to day updates beyond my capability. In other words, my interest in certain current affairs gets aroused only when they lose some of their currency.

For me, a chunk of time devoted to entertainment or enrichment is often scraped out with some effort. I can't bring myself to squandering it. If it's entertainment, I would like the taste to stay in my mouth long after that. If it's for knowledge building, it can't depend on raw nuggets of information/rumour/gossips dished out to me in loud voices, sensationalised wordings and fake emotionalism, but on crafted/distilled/verified pieces of work with a direct connection of it to things I hold dear to my thoughts.

Whether entertainment or knowledge, I can accept only things which have a dash of timelessness in them, not anything with false claim of quality but essentially volatile.