Writers Jam

I don’t really care much about celebrity deaths. If a politician died, I’d probably feel relieved that one less evil soul on earth and maybe a day off. But there’s one death that felt deeply personal to me. Irrfan Khan’s.

It was during the lockdown when I watched Qarib Qarib Singlle. It wasn’t a great film, but Irrfan was charming in it. I went to bed around 3 a.m and when I woke up the next morning, I heard the news of his death. I cried. It felt as though a close friend, a relative, or someone I knew deeply had passed away.

I had never met him yet the loss felt personal. I still miss him from time to time and I often rewatch his films. That’s the magic of cinema. It’s not quite like poetry or painting or any other art form. Cinema is a spatial and temporal documentation of actors recreating something that didn’t exist before and through that process, they reveal unknown parts of themselves. As viewers, we get to witness that, to feel those emotions and to reach places within ourselves that sometimes even words cannot reach.