Ajeeb aadmi tha woh
Mohabbaton ka geet tha,
bagaawaton ka rang tha
Kabhi woh sirf phool tha,
kabhi woh sirf aag tha
Ajeeb aadmi tha woh.
The great Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi must have had someone like Farooq Sheikh in mind when he penned those words ..
In a decade, when mainstream Hindi cinema was on a downward spiral with outlandish plots and bawdy songs, Farooq Sheikh came as a breath of fresh air. He along with the likes of Amol Palekar & Ravi Baswani came to symbolize light-hearted, “middle-class” comedies, as the proverbial Mr. Nice Guy (remember Sai Paranjpye’s Chashme Buddoor, Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Kissi Se Na Kehna and his amazing chemistry with Deepti Naval). He gave equally memorable performances as the disillusioned youth of post-partition India in M. S. Sathyu‘s Garm Hava (debut) & as the naive lover in Bazaar. And then there was this another facet of his acting, where he exuded the old world charm and tehzeeb of Lakhnavi / Awadhi royalty with elan, be it in Satyajit Ray‘s Shatranj Ke Khiladi or Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan. And all this while, he along with Shabana Azmi, continued to beguile theater lovers the world over with their enthralling performances in the two-act play Tumhari Amrita, the story of unrequited love, read out through reams of love letters between Amrita Nigam and Zulfikar Haider, exchanged over 35 years, starting with Amrita’s eighth birthday party, when she first wrote to the ten-year-old Zulfi.
Farooq Sheikh made an equally effortless transition to television as the sly, cynical & perennially dithering and indecisive minister in Ji Mantriji, an Indian adaptation of BBC’s Yes Minister or as the warm host who brought out the best in his celebrity guests in Jeena Issi Ka Naam Hai.
The last time I watched him on the big screen was in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani in a short but sensitive role as Ranbir’s father, who lets his son live out his dreams. Sadly no more .. a man of abundant aptitude and fluent charm, always endearing to the eyes.
Dec 28th, 2013 is a historic day as AAP storms to power in the national capital but an equally sad day for the cinema buff and theater lover because the man who portrayed the Aam Admi with such subtlety and dignity, is no more. But his body of work remains for generations of cinema lovers to marvel on.
His was neither a short story nor a grand novella but a life lived in the moments.
Shayad, Jeena issi ka naam hai ….
Calcutta Chromosome 