Javed Akhtar flays Bollywood for having a 'low opinion' of youth

“What is time,” asked Urdu poet and Hindi lyricist Javed Akhtar, reciting a poem entitled ‘Waqt’ to an enchanted audience at the Bengaluru Poetry Festival on Saturday.

The poem from his collection entitled ‘In other words’ raises a philosophical question whether it is time that passes by or is it fixed and unchanged as we live on. Interacting with his fans, Akhtar discussed poetry and growing up in a family of writers and poets. “By the time I was 13, I could recite works of so many great poets and I knew so much about writing. What others would have taken years of coursework to learn, I knew without attempting because of the environment I grew up in,” he reminisced.

Heartened by the resurgence of interest in poetry among the youth, Akhtar said that his generation had been too absorbed in their own pursuits to pass the heritage on to the next generation. “The movie industry has a very low opinion of the youth today and that is unfortunate. They think youngsters do not want deep, meaningful lyrics or movies when actually they are very perceptive,” he added. To a question on actor Naseeruddin Shah’s criticism of Rajesh Khanna, Akhtar reacted that Shah does not like successful people. “He criticises Dilip Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan. He never praises successful people.”

The lyricist lamented the lack of space for poetry in contemporary Bollywood which is awash with light-hearted movies and ‘supersonic’ speed of the songs. The lyricists of yore wrote songs which could hold up on their own as literature, even without music. “In UK museums, they have kept the handwritten lyrics of ‘Yesterday’ by Paul McCartney, along with manuscripts of great writers like William Shakespeare, Blake and Oscar Wilde. We Indians have an inferiority complex because of which we hesitate to acknowledge the work of people like Gulzar and Sahir Ludhianvi as literature.” He recounted how he found a bundle of poems written by his grandfather, Muztar Khairabadi, in a box of his father Jan Nisar Akhtar’s possessions, compiled with the intention of publishing it. Taking the unfinished task upon himself, Akhtar hired people to collect his grandfather’s work and the project lasted 10 years and resulted in a five-volume collection.

“It makes me sad to think that there are several such great poets whose works have gone undiscovered and forgotten. We need to form a society which will work to retrieve such poems,” he said.