There was no drama in the way Nana Patekar spoke about death. No elaborate philosophy, no attempt to make mortality sound profound. In an old interview, the actor simply said: “I am not scared of death, jab nikalna hai nikalna hai.”The remark, made during a conversation with Siddharth Kannan has resurfaced following his death. In the same 2024 Indian Express interview, the actor spoke about a childhood shaped by poverty, hunger and having to grow up much earlier than most children.Patekar said he began working when he was just 13. He recalled earning Rs 35 a month and sometimes having only one meal a day while continuing his education. “I started working at the age of 13. So I turned 30 very early in life,” he said.He described how his circumstances affected the way he saw age and life. “So I feel your haalat (circumstances) decide your age,” he said. But he added that eventually he stopped allowing his circumstances to define him. Instead, he said, he decided his own age and joked that he could be 18 or 19 if he wanted.It was in this larger conversation about life that he spoke about death.“I am not scared of death, jab nikalna hai nikalna hai,” Patekar said, essentially expressing the idea that when one’s time comes, it comes.
His relationship with hardship shaped the way he saw life
Patekar’s comments did not come from an abstract discussion about mortality. Much of the interview was about the realities of his childhood.He remembered hunger so vividly that when asked whether he preferred the fragrance of roses or jasmine, he said he preferred the aroma of bhakri. “No other aroma is more desirable to the stomach,” he said.He also described hunger as so dominant in his early life that there was little room to notice the happier things around him. “For us hunger was such a big issue that we never could see the flowers,” he said.That may explain why Patekar often spoke about life in unusually practical terms. His childhood had forced him to confront difficult realities early, and his comments suggest that he did not spend much time trying to romanticise them.
He chose laughter over fear
There was another striking part of the interview. Despite discussing poverty and mortality, Patekar did not present himself as someone consumed by either.Instead, he spoke about laughter.“Mujhe hassi mazak ke siva aur kuch sujhta nahi,” he said, nothing comes to his mind apart from laughter and humour.That combination, an acceptance of death, memories of hunger and an insistence on finding humour in life, gives the resurfaced interview a different weight today.The line about death was not a prediction. It was a reflection from a man who had already spent much of his life confronting uncertainty.Now, after his passing, those few words are being heard differently.Not because Nana Patekar knew what was coming, but because he had once spoken about death in the same matter-of-fact way he spoke about hunger, ageing, work and the circumstances that shaped him.“Jab nikalna hai nikalna hai.”For an actor who spent decades giving audiences intense performances, perhaps that was one of his most revealing lines away from the screen.
