Bollywood Melodies by Ganesh Anantharaman

Author:Ganesh Anantharaman [Anantharaman, Ganesh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789386495310
Publisher: Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2008-02-13T18:30:00+00:00

javed akhtar: in pursuit Of first love

It was 1942—A Love Story in the early 1990s that put the erstwhile scriptwriter, who assiduously built Amitabh’s persona as the ‘angry young man’ in the 1970s through his screenplays in partnership with Salim, in the reckoning as a top lyricist of Bollywood. You wonder why Javed Akhtar’s work as lyricist in the preceding decade is almost invisible, though he wrote quite a few memorable songs, beginning with ‘Yeh kahan aa gaye hum’ and ‘Neela asmaan so gaya’ in Silsila (1981). Perhaps it had to do with the overall decline in music in the 1980s. Javed started out his career as lyricist in a decade when even established lyricists such as Indeewar had succumbed to writing ‘Jhopdi mein charpayee’ (Mawaali, 1982).

If Silsila gave you a taste of the man’s flair for poetry, small-budget Saath Saath the following year confirmed that the man who wrote feisty screenplays could also turn a sublime poet. After all, the son of Jan Nisar Akhtar, who wrote simple but potent lyrics for O.P. Nayyar in the 1950s and 1960s, knew he’d be measured against his father’s output. If ‘Kyon zindagi ki raah mein majboor ho gaye’ (Chitra Singh) was a pain-lashed lament over the loss of ideals and the consequent estrangement in a relationship, ‘Tumko dekha to yeh khayal aaya’ (Jagjit Singh) was about all the longing, all the uncertainties of first love. Barring Arth, Jagjit rarely came close to sounding so effective in films, and young Javed’s words—Aaj phir dil ne ek tamanna ki/Aaj phir dil ko humne samjhaaya/Zindagi dhoop tum ghanaa saaya—had much to do with it.

Javed captured the idealism of youth, their spirit of ‘raring to go’ brilliantly in the song ‘Zindagi aa raha hoon main’ in Mashaal (scored by Hridaynath Mangeshkar, sung by Kishore, 1984), with the telling words ‘Mere haathon ki garmi se/Pighal jaayengi zanjeerein/Mere qadmon ki aahat se/Badal jayengi taqdeerein/Umeedon ke diye lekar/Ye sab tere liye lekar/Zindagi aa raha hoon main’. A pity the film bombed, despite convincing performances by Dilip Kumar and Anil Kapoor, and the best solo of Kishore Kumar in his last years.

With Saagar (1985) began Javed’s tryst with commercial cinema, and the fledgling lyricist showed an ability to manage the tightrope between artistic integrity and commercial success, penning ‘Jaane do na’ as his bow to trade, even while writing the more polished ‘Sagar kinaare dil yeh pukaare’. This was followed by more tepid songs in Arjun (1985), Mr. India (1987) and Tezaab (1988), all three taking the lyricist on a spiral of popularity, even as he was steadily rubbishing poetry with lyrics as trite as ‘Mammaiyya kero kero kero mamma’ (Arjun), ‘Hawaa hawaai’ (Mr. India) and ‘Ek do teen’ (Tezaab). Mercifully, Javed seems to have realized this himself, and took a long break of five years before he came up with genuine poetry in 1942—A Love Story. In ‘Kuch na kaho’ and ‘Pyaar hua chupke se’ you find again the promise he displayed in Saath Saath a decade earlier.

With

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