Vijay Varma
Despite growing up in a household in which watching movies was not a thing, I don't know any other person who has left such a deep impact on me. By the time I came to know who Irrfan was, I realized I had been seeing him onscreen for years.
The first time I saw him was in a Hutch commercial, he made it feel so personal that we would wait in between matches to watch those ads again.
When I was at the Film and Television Institute of India, the way the other students regarded and loved Irrfan, the kind of fandom he had, led me to watch some of his films. I'd heard a lot about Haasil (2003) and so found it on VCD.
He and his craft remain a mystery to most of us. We were awaiting the continuation of his career because he had so much to offer. And he had just started to be a lot more open in interviews.
I met him for the first time at film school, after I'd watched Haasil and Maqbool (2003). He was shooting A Mighty Heart (2007) with Angelina Jolie in Pune and he said that he didn't want to take a class, but he wanted to meet the students.
The second time I met him was at Cannes. I'd gone there because Monsoon Shootout (2013) was playing and he was there with The Lunchbox (2013). Meeting him was so surreal.
I'd been to a couple of his movie premieres including Inferno (2016), Angrezi Medium (2020) and Life of Pi (2012). Each time, he was fully nervous, he wanted to disappear and kept asking people, 'Did you like it?
There's a lot that I've learnt from him but so much more he had to offer the world. I haven't seen three or four of his films and I'm saving them like a treasure I can cherish later.