Mandar Natekar

Naseeruddin Shah crawled out of the gate with a string of self-important turds: Nishant, Bhumika, Junoon, Sparsh, Aakrosh, Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Ata Hai, Bazaar, Masoom, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Paar. One accidental hit (Masoom) and a pile of commercially stillborn pretensions. That was enough for the Uni-Dimensional Actors Network (UDAN) to anoint him. Om Puri, Smita Patil, Shabana Azmi, Farooq Sheikh, Deepti Naval, the Rainas, Pankaj Parashars, a closed circle of actors whose combined lifetime footfall could fit inside a single multiplex on a Tuesday. They awarded each other, wrote each other’s forewords, and spent decades congratulating themselves for refusing to do anything an audience actually wanted to watch. Naseer swallowed the praise whole and decided he would be the first UDAN member to also make real money. He forced himself into the kind of films that required him to attempt laughter, anger, louder dialogue, action, romance, and basic human expressiveness. Sunayna, Police Public, Takkar, Agnichakra, and a straight-to-oblivion B-grade called Encounter: The Killing. The numbers stayed dead. Hindi cinema, for all its sins, still preferred heroes who possessed a chin and eyes that didn’t look like they belonged on a startled amphibian. The face simply could not carry a commercial film. It could barely carry a close-up without the lighting and framing doing heavy damage control. Whatever mainstream success he later touched was never his. In Tridev, Sunny Deol and Jackie Shroff reduced him to set dressing. Ajay Devgn erased him in Najaayaz. Sunil Shetty out-muscled and out-screened him in Mohra. Aamir Khan made him look like a supporting lecturer in Sarfarosh. He collected the paycheck, then slunk back to the UDAN reservation where mediocrity was treated as integrity and commercial failure was rebranded as artistic courage. Now he is a bitter, irrelevant old man who spent his career being told he was profound by people whose own careers proved nothing of the sort. He resents Dilip Kumar for having a chin and actual stardom. He resents Amitabh for the same reason. He dismisses Rajesh Khanna as a non-actor while ignoring that Khanna caused mass hysteria for years. He despises the Khans, Devgn, Chakraborty, the Kapoors, and anyone else who managed to matter to the public he never reached. The hatred is not aesthetic. It is the resentment of a man who was repeatedly informed by ticket sales that he was not what the country wanted, and who has never forgiven the country for it. In his final act he discovered political grandstanding. For the first time in his life he received real-time applause- retweets, headlines, the cheap dopamine of being called brave by people who already agreed with him. He labelled himself a “Dimagi Naxal,” urged revolt from the safety of his drawing room, and began presenting himself as the sole commercially viable product of the UDAN ecosystem. It is the last available stage for an actor who could never fill one. Most people are mediocre. The difference is that Naseeruddin Shah was told, early and often, that he was exceptional, and he has spent the rest of his life refusing to notice the evidence that he was not. He will disappear with a handful of parallel-cinema footnotes and a late-life social-media tantrum. The new generation of UDAN descendants will write the same empty tributes. Everyone else will have already moved on. To Sona Spa maybe.