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Whether it was portraying existential dilemma through the very melodious song Seene mein jalan ( Gaman ) or playing the crafty Vasu in Katha , Farooque Shaikh portrayed fifty shades of human emotions with ease on celluloid.
Farooque (65), who passed away Friday following a heart attack in Dubai, was the aam aadmi you met every day.
He turned aam aadmi into the fashion statement it has become today. Through his nuanced performance, the roles that Shaikh essayed were true to life and rooted deep in society’s sub-conscious.
Farooque’s celluloid journey started when he was studying law. Being associated with Indian People’s Theatre Association, M. S. Sathyu spotted him and offered him a role in Garam Hawa .
Loneliness, frustration, happiness, bliss and manipulation — the entire range of human emotions found expression in Farooque , whose acting skills were chiselled by directors such as Satyajit Ray, Muzzafar Ali, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Sai Paranjpe and Basu Chatterjee, who brought out the best in him through myriad roles.
He captured the popular imagination with his innocence in Chashme Badoor trying to impress Miss Chamko (Deepti Naval, his co-star) and even wooing the very beautiful Rekha in Umrao Jaan .
Farooque made low-budget parallel cinema mainstream through his eclectic and subtle portrayals, be it in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi , Bazaar , Kissi Se Na Kehna , Anjuman , Rang Birangi and Ek Pal . Films like Yash Chopra’s Noorie put him in the mainstream bracket, with songs like Aja Re O , picturised on him, becoming a chartbuster in 1978.
In the 80s, Farooque injected life into Doordarshan’s TV serial, Srikant , and much later in the 2000s to Jeena Isi Ka Naam Hai as a presenter.
Besides this, there are a dozen other plays, including the mega hit Tumhari Amrita which he enacted along with co-star Shabana Azmi. The play , an adaptation of A. R. Gurney’s American play, Love Letters (1988), and directed by Feroz Abbas Khan, was staged first in 1992.
The play, where two lovers express life’s humdrum happenings through an exchange of letters, ran to packed houses despite its stark set with just a cast of two (Shabana Azmi being the other) and just a table for prop, .
Recently, he was seen in films, such as Club 60 and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani in which he played Ranbir Kapoor’s father. Farooque is survived by wife Rupa and two daughters.
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