Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
Of secular art and iconic dialogue
When poet, lyricist, and screenplay writer Javed Akhtar was born, his father read out the Communist Manifesto to him, instead of reciting the azaan, the Islamic call to prayer, as is the tradition. The seeds were sown for an extraordinary journey. Named Jaadu by his professor-writer parents Safia and Jan Nisar Akhtar (later changed to Javed when he was enrolled at school), life was magical till the day after his eighth birthday, when his mother died, an event that changed the trajectory of his life.
In this conversational biography with documentary filmmaker and writer on films Nasreen Munni Kabir, Akhtar looks back with fondness and emotion at his life – his struggles, his mistakes, and his penchant for swimming against the tide.
“(In my family) I had politics on one side and poetry and literature on the other. It was natural that I’d be influenced by both,” he tells Kabir in Talking Life, the final part in the trilogy that includes Talking Films and Talking Songs.
Following his mother’s death, Akhtar shuffled between Lucknow, Aligarh and Bhopal – largely ignored by his father (who now lived in Bombay), and at the mercy of friends and extended family. There were times when his younger brother Salman and he had to go hungry for days, and sleep on school benches full of bugs. Akhtar revisits these dark chapters of his life in a matter-of-fact way. There is neither anger nor shame, nor an attempt to gain the reader’s sympathy. He narrates these episodes with his biggest weapon – humour. The only time one senses bitterness is when he refers to his father. “I wrote to my father, asking him what he was doing. I never got a reply. All these incidents added to the growing resentment and anger I felt towards him, and our relationship became increasingly negative and strained.”
When Akhtar arrived in Bombay in 1964, he was 19.
He landed at the doorstep of his father, who had remarried and had another set of children by then. Akhtar’s stepmother made it clear that he wasn’t welcome. The two years of intense struggle that followed in Bombay is the stuff of Bollywood legends. His first job was as an apprentice at Kamal Amrohi’s company, Mahal Pictures. His salary was Rs 50.
“At the entrance of studio floor number one there were some long planks and two wooden crates. They became my
Talking Life:
Javed Akhtar
In conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir 214pp, ~799 Westland Books property. I took the two wooden crates, put a plank across them, and slept on it at night. I did not have a dhurrie, sheet or pillow. I positioned this plank-bed in such a way that the light coming from floor one fell on me so I could read at night.”
Life took a turn for the better when he teamed up with Salim Khan. Though their first film script narration resulted in a “jugalbandi of yawns”, 20 of the 24 films that the duo did together were superhits. He tells Kabir that, whether it was Sholay, Deewar, Trishul or Don, the storyline nearly always came from Salim. “The basic twists, even the persona of the angry young man, who became so famous, were Salim Sahib’s ideas.” However, in this partnership the iconic lines were always
Akhtar’s: “Mere paas ma hai”, “Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahi, namumkin hai!”
When he was asked by filmmaker Yash Chopra to write songs for Silsila, he initially resisted, but then started enjoying that phase of his life. He is sad that the use of the song (in films) has changed. “Sometimes, the song tells you far more than a scene. A song like Wo subah kabhi toh aayegi cannot be replaced by dialogue.”
When someone asked him recently to write a song in “everyday language”, he retorted: “In your vocabulary a song cannot be written, only a telegram, but now even that’s not possible because the era of the telegram is over.”
When Kabir asked him if filmmakers of the 1970s were secular in their thinking, he tells her, “…Art can only survive if it is secular… You cannot remain parochial, communal, narrowminded in art... that is why the right wing all over the world has been unable to create great artistes.”
Akhtar often thinks about his father. “Sometimes I feel sad for him; at other times, I think he was a weak man. I’d like to know whether he was aware that he had let his children down. I never got the feeling he realised it. He believed it was he who was wronged in life – you can sense that in his poetry. It’s so easy to believe that the world has wronged you.”
Kabir presents a hitherto unknown side of Akhtar. As for the man himself, he wins hearts with his honesty, and his courage to stand by his convictions.