Irfan Khan, 1967-2020
Published by
Razib Khan
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin. View all posts by Razib Khan
What a legend!!! from hindi medium to paan singh tomar to life of pi. This man was and will remain the most gifted talent of this generation.
May your soul RIP.
For a moment though looks like people are united. Sad part is that it took a death of a legend to unite us all.
Great actor indeed.
Big Loss for Indian film industry !
Yes, I feel he just started getting the recognition that he deserved.
Did anyone see one of his movies – Qarib Qarib single. What did you think of the class clash in the movie or am I the only one who picked it up. I was discussing the same with another group 2 days ago.
in doordarshan days, he had done a role in a play set for munshi premchand’s nirmala as her step son.
He was like a cool uncle i never had. RIP
I still think his best roles were as Ashok in The Namesake and Sajan in The Lunchbox. He really had a gift for portraying the “Indian Soul” in his work.
I feel he would have been a rage on streaming services. He had the bad luck of falling b/w the cracks. His prime (90s-2000s) was consumed by struggling for work in the whole Johar-Chopra’s larger than life Bollywood.
Now when alternate movies and tv shows have platforms and are viable he could have been even bigger star than what he was.
There was something catchy about his voice that grabbed the attention. Irrfan and Nawazuddin are my favourite actors in the Hindi cinema on the basis of acting.
A true artist. My favourite roles of his.
*Ranvijay Singh in Haasil – ambitious, conniving, ruthless political climber.
*Senapati Bhadrashal in Chanakya – brave but corrupt general of Magadh.
*Lafcadia in The Warrior – brutal mercenary in search of redemption.
A very recent release is also worth watching, featuring Irrfan – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karwaan. Good acting by most of the cast.