Mumbai: “I don’t know why, perhaps on account of my deprived childhood, but the concept of juice really amuses me,” Javed Akhtar says with a chuckle as he considers the glassful being offered to him. A few minutes and a glass of water later, he resumes the conversation that the orange juice had momentarily interrupted. The poet, lyricist and film writer settles down to give us a glimpse into his journey in verses and as an individual.
There is a gap of nearly three decades between his first break as a scriptwriter with Yakeen in 1969 after several years of struggle in the Indian film industry and Tarkash, his first collection of Urdu poetry published in 1995.
What took the poet in him so long to make himself known to the world? “I was always interested in poetry since I was a child, but never actually wrote myself. There were two reasons for this. The first is that knowledge can be frightening in its own way. I really knew what good poetry was and that intimidated me because I was apprehensive about whether I would be able to write good enough poetry or not. The second reason was the mode of rebellion I held on to for a long time. If the son of a shopkeeper chooses to rebel, the first thing he will do is stop sitting at the shop. So it was with me and poetry. I used to say, mujhe nahin karni yeh bekaar ki cheez, even though I actually knew a lot of shers by heart,” he recalls.
The lyricist has had to live through some extremely harsh circumstances. “A lot of us tend to romanticise our past, trying to dwell on the good things rather than the struggles. There are some things, however, that you cannot forget. There are days when I find myself looking at leftover food after a meal and thinking, us din iska aadha hi mil jata? The trauma of hunger isn’t easy to erase from your memory. It teaches you to look at food in a very different way,” he says and adds, “But I’ve learnt that such experiences create extreme reactions.
You can be bitter, ruthless, careless or you can become compassionate because you understand deprivation.”
