Birthday Special: When Javed Akhtar confessed: 'There aren't too many filmmakers and composers I'm comfortable with'

To Javed Akhtar goes the credit for making poetry accessible to the common man. He feels that is what poetry is supposed to do. In Javed Saab’s opinion if a poet can’t communicate his lines to the common man , then why is he making his art public?

“ Some artistes say they don’t care if their art is not understood. But there should be some difference between your diary and shairi,” quips the inimitable Javed Saab.

Ek do teen chaar in Tezaab and Tumko dekha toh yeh khayaal aaya in Saath Saath. How could the same poet write these two polarized songs.Looking back on fifty years of his career as a screenwriter and lyricist one can see there have been pain and pleasure, achievements and failures. Javed feels both are equally integral to life. But he does confess he wasted ten of his fifty years by not working in a more disciplined way.

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About the falling standards of Hindi films songs Javed Saab feels the songs are a part of the narrative. If the narrative is of an inferior quality, the situations are bound to be inferior. These in turn demand inferior songs.The bard who wrote some of the most poetic songs of his times in 1942: A Love Story and Silsila feels the songs for Kagaz Ke Phool, Pyaasa or Baiju Bawra could only have been possible in those films and in the days gone-by.

Javed Saab feels there’s a kind of fear in today’s filmmakers that audiences’ attention span has shortened. Hence there’s a frenzied tempo in the narrative at the cost of depth. When songs run at a frantic speed words are no longer important. And since words no longer register as poetry or anything near it, lyricists are allowed to get away with anything.

He also feels the quality of music today is very unsympathetic towards poetic lyrics. The people who are extracting work out of lyricists aren’t trained to understand poetry. Earlier on composers understood music and poetry. Sachin Dev Burman wasn’t fluent in Hindi. But his sense of poetry was still impeccable.

Opines Javed Saab, “Something is wrong with society at large. In our educational system the Hindustani and Urdu languages are being marginalized. We ‘re living in an era of a cultural void.”

It has taken a lot of time for Javed Akhtar to get to where he is. When initially his lyrics in film like Silsila, Sagar, Dil Chahta Hai and Saath Saath did well he was offered a lot of films. He declined all the films where he felt he would have to write something he didn’t want to,and couldn’t. The film industry got the message loud and clear.

Says Javed Saab, “I cannot go beyond my inbuilt sense of morality. You ask me how I seek out good projects. I think such projects seek me out. I admit there aren’t too many filmmakers and composers I’m comfortable with. Main toh wahi karunga jo karta aaya hoon. No bad language, no grammatically incorrect metres for me. Poets can take liberties but within the given grammatical structures.”

Javed Saab names Shailendra , Sahir Ludhianvi Majrooh Sultanpuri, Javed’s father Jan Nissar Akhtar, Raja Mehndi Ali Khan, Bharat Vyas, Pradeep, Kaifi Azmi, Anjaan among his favourite lyricists. Javed Saab has set certain standards for himself . He believes language is for communication. “What’s the point of writing a song if it doesn’t communicate itself to the listeners? My father Jan Nissar Akhtar used to say, it’s very easy to write difficult songs and very difficult to write easy songs. A simple language possesses a kind of transparency which a lyricist can afford only when he’s sure of his ideas.You have to be very clear about your ideas to write simply. If you enter a dark room and you don’t know where the light switches, you keep groping in the dark. I’d like to believe I know where the switches are. Ambiguity forbids simple expression. I shy away from ambiguity.”

Javed Saab misses Lataji to give voice to his poetry. “There’s no singer in this universe who can intone words the way she could. Even if you don’t know the meaning of a word you know by her expression. That’s what a lyricist craves for.”

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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