The Angrier Young Man

Om Puri’s death marks the end of an era where an unlikely hero could become a true star.

- Gautam Chintamani

ARDH SATYA’S DIRECTOR Govind Nihalani, on a flight from Prague to Bombay, misplaced the Best Actor Award that the lead of the film Om Puri won at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, in the erstwhile Czechoslovakia. There is no keepsake of the biggest award that Puri, who died following a massive heart attack on 6 January, won for what is arguably his greatest acting performance. Much like the course of his career, Puri’s body of work is his award, and everything else, perhaps a footnote. Om Puri’s more illustrious contemporaries such as Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, and Smita Patil might have been considered the poster boy and girls of the changing values of Indian cinema in the later 1970s and early 1980s, but Puri was, quite literally, the face of the entire transition.

In a profile of the late actor that appeared in August 1984, in India Today, author Sunil Sethi noted that Puri’s constant co-star Smita Patil, herself someone who broke new ground when it came to unconventionality entering the mainstream, felt that the acceptance of Om Puri had a lot to do with the changed perception of the new cinema. Looking back at Puri’s life, if the talk about his “face” being the one thing that helped him break through does not make much sense now, or seems irrelevant, then it is a testimony of what Puri achieved.