Irrfan Khan: The Man Of Many Journeys

He is one celebrity, who is known to have an interesting life journey, full of twists and turns and life lessons galore. As Irrfan Khan stands on yet another turning point of his life, here’s a quick glance at why we need this actor to continue to enlighten and stimulate us with his performances.

- Arwa Janjali

Ek din hamein samajh mein aaya that unless and until you become a good human being, you can never be an actor... that’s not true actually,” Irrfan Khan joked with a straight face during an interview with Film Companion last year. The actor has always had a whacky sense of humour as much as a philosophical bent of mind, which he is known for. He speaks his mind when it comes to giving an opinion on issues (without any attempt to be overtly bombastic or controversial) and pours his heart out while talking about acting and cinema.

Since the last four months, the actor’s twitter a ccount has been buzzing with life jargons posted by him, depicting his solemn state of mind. After posting Margaret Mitchell’s quote, ‘Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect’, and responding to it with ‘the unexpected makes you grow...’, he sent a post from London to Bombay Times last month, in which he wrote about trusting and surrendering, irrespective of the outcome, and how the suddenness of life hitting him had made him realise that he was just a cork floating in the ocean with unpredictable currents, and that the cork didn’t need to control the currents.

And then, you watch him in the trailer of his upcoming Hollywood film, Puzzle, with Kelly Macdonald, where he spouts away the dialogue, “Life is messy if there’s nothing we can do to control anything.” All of this bears an uncanny resemblance to the present reality of the actor—his life in a nutshell, after being diagnosed with neuroendocrine tumour in March. It presents the irony and eeriness of the unpredictability of life and most of all, poses the dreadful question: Are we really losing this gem of a find our film industry has had?