Bollywood reacts to Roger Ebert's demise

Sudhir Mishra: “Roger Ebert was one of the critics who taught me how to look at cinema and to see the director inside the film and the director’s vision or the lack of it.” Santosh Sivan: “I met Roger Ebert for the first time at the Independent Spirits awards at Los Angeles where my film Terrorist was nominated. He was a warm and passionate human being. He featured Terrorist among his 100 best films. He was instrumental in getting Ayesha Dharker (who played the lead in Terrorist) a part in Star Wars. More than anything else, he was very encouraging to film buffs and filmmakers, specially students. He also embraced foreign films and he had a great knowledge of films from all over the world.” Resul Pookutty: “I interacted with Roger Ebert when he wrote the first article on Slumdog Millionaire (the film that won Resul his Oscar). His prediction about the film came true. He selected Slumdog Millionaire as one of his 10 best films of the decade. I feel proud to be in his list and at the same time feel a great sense of loss . He was like an elder brother whose words about cinema always rang true. His place in the world of film criticism is unique. He was one of those rare film lovers who had an instinctive gift for predicting the success or failure of a film from its very first glimpse. All of us would wait to read what Roger had to say. He was our godfather.” Sreekar Prasad: “A passionate critic who brought great respectability to film criticism. Most filmmakers waited for his opinion on their work. We waited every year to read his Top 10 films. A look back at cinema in 2013 would just not be that meaningful without him.” Mayank Shekhar: “You can tell from the reception to his work and his subsequent farewell that Roger Ebert wasn't just an accessible film reviewer (there are thousands of those now). Ebert wrote about life, politics, sports, society, his own illness, others’ deeper malaise....The film review was just his medium. He took the Friday film reviewing form out of the journalistic armpit and pumped it in with a lot of heart and honest emotion , by turns gentle and angry. The first review I read of his was for a 2000 film The Wonder Boys. The piece was as much his autobiography as it was movie commentary, and I thought to myself "Wow, you can do that and it can be still be a film review?" I have never stopped thinking like that for almost every Friday since.” Rajeev Masand: “Crushed to hear of his passing. He was a guiding light to movie fans like me. He discovered the little things that mattered even in the unlikeliest of films. He showed us that a critic’s job isn’t just to tell people what to watch and what not to watch every week. A critic also needs to build an appetite for quality cinema. One of my life’s big ambitions would now never be fulfilled. I wanted to meet him and tell him just how he changed my life. I did try to meet him in Cannes. But by then he had become unwell and had stopped traveling.”