I am against remixing, its a crime: Gulzar

But the 74-year-old song-writer is completely against one trend, that of remixing old songs, and he is not ready to listen to the excuse of changing times here. Gulzar feels that it is a crime against the cinematic history of India.

"I am against remixing. The songs are now used only to dance. Who are you to temper with someone else's creation," Gulzar told a packed audience at the ongoing Jaipur literature festival.

"I blame the present generation for destroying cinematic history. It is like repainting Ajanta and Ellora. They don't need a song to listen, they want to dance on the tunes and thus wreck havoc on the old songs."

When asked by an audience member whether colouring of classics like 'Mughal-e-Azam' would be considered bad too, Gulzar promptly said, "Yes, it should not have been done. Who are we to redo K Asif's vision?"

He was accompanied by two other eminent lyricists, Javed Akhtar and Prasoon Joshi, for the session 'Geet Gaata Chal' - and it was not often that the trio agreed on one topic, much to the delight of the audience.

Akhtar blamed the change in Bollywood songs on a sense of embarrassment in the present generation of filmmakers. The lyricist said that there is a rush to ape the western structure in Indian cinema.

"The relationship between drama and songs is very old in our country. We always had songs in our theatre and they came to cinema from there. 'Alam Ara' had 50 songs.

"But we have suddenly become defensive about expressing softer emotions like love and pain through songs and lip-sync is slowly disappearing from our films. Such songs have been relegated to the background now because there is a market for the songs but we don't want them as part of the narrative," Akhtar said.