As Angrezi Medium completes a year Radhika Madan and Homi Adajania relive moments with Irrfan and talk about how the film has impacted them
Sugandha Rawal (HINDUSTAN TIMES; March 12, 2021)

It has been a year since her film, Angrezi Medium, was released, and actor Radhika Madan credits it for changing the game for her. Now, she says her work is her priority, but so is her health and family.

“Just a day after the film released, theatres started shutting down (due to Coronavirus pandemic). So, 2020 has been a learning year for me. I realised that I was running behind superficial things and now, I’ve got my priorities in check,” Madan says.

She adds that Angrezi Medium, which released in the UAE market on March 12 and in India on March 13, helped her embark on the journey of self discovery. “The response that I got for the movie has changed my life,” she says, calling 2020 a “game-changer year”.

So, what is your priority today? “My family and health,” she says without taking any time.

“And just being thankful that we have food on the table, and have great health. These are a few things that we take for granted, and the pandemic taught us that we should not do that,” shares the 25-year-old, recalling the time when she couldn’t visit her family in Delhi during the lockdown, and her self quarantine period.

“It made me realise how fleeting life is. Now, my work is also my priority, it is not above my family,” she tells us.

When it comes to Angrezi Medium, which also featured late actor Irrfan, Madan feels it started the trend of releasing films on OTT platforms. After being removed from the theatres because of shutdown just after a day of release, the film premiered on a streaming site on April 6.

“At that time, not many were willing to release big films on OTT platforms. But we thought that we have made the film to entertain the audience, and it’s not about when the theatres will reopen, and so we released it digitally. It was the first big film to release on a streaming platform,” she shares.
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There are many reasons to remember Homi Adajania’s Angrezi Medium, from being the last film that released before the lockdown last year to being late actor Irrfan's last film. With the film completing one year of release, Adajania says, “Last year was a unique experience where I had less distractions and more time to figure what the whole circus of life is about. As for losing Irrfan, even though we were expecting him to pass around that time, when he died, it took longer and was harder for me to process than I thought it would be.”

Adajania recalls the final moments of the actor while he was shooting with him. “I remember he told me towards the end that if he could go back and change anything, he wouldn’t. He felt the realisation he had attained was so precious, that he wouldn’t have achieved it in a hundred lifetimes,” says Adajania.

The filmmaker reveals that Irrfan used to scoff “at spending so much of his life identifying with a label, ‘Irrfan Khan — famous actor, cross-over super star, blah blah blah’. He couldn’t believe that we actually limit our understanding of ourselves to what we want the world to think of us and what we believe the world thinks of us. The last few times that I met him, he had achieved a rare sense of liberation. He was free from the self-imposed shackles that we start collecting from a very early age,” he shares.

Ask him how he would like to pay tribute to the late actor, and Adajania makes it clear that he has no such intention. “He’s got a special place in the memories of absolutely everyone’s lives he touched and that doesn’t need a date to be celebrated or announced, it’s just something that is always there,” he signs off.