By Charudutta Panigrahi
Some people you meet for an hour and carry for a lifetime. Nana Patekar was that for me.
It was at IFFI1 in Goa, a few years ago. The formalities of the official function were over, and the dignitaries were being ushered to their seats. A chair had been kept for him, as chairs always are for men of his stature. A senior lady stood nearby with nowhere to sit. He saw her before anyone else did, and he gave her his place. The people around him protested and insisted, as people around the famous always do. He ignored them, quietly and completely, the way one ignores a noise. There was no flourish in it, no glance to see who was watching. He simply would not sit while she stood.
I did not know then that I had already seen the whole man.
That evening there was a get-together, and a common friend introduced us. He, of course, needed no introduction. We exchanged a couple of lines of courtesy, and then, almost without my noticing how, we were talking, engrossed about social development. Rather, he was talking, and I was looking at him, unable to do much else.
He spoke of programmes and people, of what works in a village and what only works on paper, of the farmer and the land. He spoke of “his work” in agriculture, and there was not a grain of boast in the phrase. He spoke as a worker speaks of the day’s labour, not as a benefactor speaks of his gift. Listening to him, you would never have guessed that he was the giver behind the effort. He had placed himself among the hands, not above them.
I remember the face more than the words. The eyes glowed. The nostrils flared as the conviction rose in him. My mother used to say that people with those two features are meant to be extraordinary, that they carry a rare individual presence and that their word comes to matter in society. I thought of her that evening. She was right, as mothers are.
What struck me most was his forthrightness. He belonged to an industry that thrives on compliance and malleability, where agreeing is a career and bending is a skill. To stand on your own there takes temerity, and his eyes shone with it. His voice was emphatic, the voice of a man who had never learnt to say what he did not mean. The plain speech, the straight speech, the easy way he lived, the humility that came naturally and was never an act put on for the room, the oratory, the articulation, the command he held over himself: all of it showed in those few minutes. Nothing was held in reserve for a better audience.
Our conversation was not long. Its impact has lasted me forever.
The world will remember the actor, and it should. It will remember the coiled fury, the silences that said more than pages of dialogue, the voice that could turn a line into a verdict. Others who knew him across decades will write of the craft, and they will write it better than I can. I knew him for one evening. But I saw him give away a chair, and I heard him speak of the poor without once placing himself above them, and I believe an evening can be enough.
Hermann Hesse, I am told, saw in such lives the triumph of creativity over mortality: a human footprint that refuses to die. Nana’s footprint is of that kind. It is pressed into the soil he cared about, into the screen he set alight, and into people like me, who met him briefly and were never quite the same.
“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die,” wrote Thomas Campbell. By that measure, he has gone nowhere. He lives in the farmer who found a hand on his shoulder in a bad season, in the audience that still holds its breath when he appears, and in a stranger at a festival in Goa who went home with something he could not name.
The chair he gave away that evening stays with me. He never needed one. Men like him do not occupy seats. They occupy memory.
Glowing eyes, flared nostrils, an emphatic voice, a presence that is, and will remain, indelible — go well, Nana. You stood so that others could sit.
- International Film Festival of India ↩︎
Charudutta Panigrahi is a writer and a culturist.
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