Muzzafar Ali is more than just the creator of ‘Umrao Jaan’, the eponymous musical film of the 1980s; the movie is but only a glimpse of his unbounded creativity. Zikr: In the Light and Shade of Time captures the wealth of experiences that shaped this enigmatic persona — a poet, a filmmaker, an author, a fashion designer, and a cultural revivalist. Born into the princely house of Kotwara, the boy in him was exposed to a wealth of experiences, happenings and encounters that helped him locate and cultivate many passions that also include cars and couture. Manifest in this poetic and colourful autobiography is the importance of freedom — "A person has to feel free in society to express himself".
As an artist and a filmmaker, Muzaffar Ali’s deeply perceptive life reads like a poem in visual narrative. Zikr, which translates to 'mention', especially in the spiritual context, comes across as a journey in pursuit of the author’s intellectual and spiritual evolution: "Each person I have worked with has opened a new world of creativity inside me, and this is what adds value to our lives." Notable is the case of a roadside cobbler at Opera House whom he had invited to join him in giving a creative meaning to the medium of leather. This moving relationship lasted several decades, till the end of the cobbler Bharat Waghchare’s life. “His contribution to my creativity is immeasurable," recounts Ali, for whom art has been a way of sensitising and humanising people.
A man of many arts, Ali says that it is through arts that everything feels connected. No surprise, Umrao Jaan is the coming together of art, science, and the philosophy of life. Making a film is a visual journey, as much art as science, and as much method as madness. The author perceives filmmaking as both a learning and teaching process. Each of his many films, Gaman, Umrao Jaan and Anjuman bears testimony to it. Zikr is more than an autobiography as it explores his deep love of life in all aspects of existence — from science to poetry and from music to cinema. Life has been a large shifting canvas for Muzaffar Ali in a way that is both intriguing and inspiring — an empowering journey from the science class in Aligarh to being the curator of Jahan-e-Khusrau that seamlessly connects the past with the present and the future, beyond the life of the ordinary.
Written with a clarity worthy of Flaubert, this is an autobiographical journey designed to take others along in imaginative and creative ways. Zikr is therefore a virtual who’s who of some of the most creative people of his time. The author rightfully claims to be a people person, a very accepting and tolerant kind and thus he says he was being enriched while enriching others. In the end, all such experiences and encounters transcended and translated into expressions of beauty. Throughout these richly textured personal anecdotes, one notices poetic expressions of love and beauty.
In connecting the dreadful dots of Partition with the present rhetoric of communalism, the author advocates the need to realise a new scale to gauge humanity. A new scale of softness is needed to build intangible bridges of compassion and tolerance. The annual Jahan-e-Khusrau event is a journey he has undertaken for others — for the eyes of others, the ears of others, and the mind of others. Only by becoming someone else, can you see beauty in everyone else. The author concludes that these are the footprints he intends to leave behind.
Through Zikr: In the Light and Shade of Time, Muzaffar Ali reveals the genius of an artistic soul in him. Peppered with inspiring verses, the book has something for everyone as it allows the reader to look out of the window at the hopeful promise of the future. Written in poetic prose, the book concludes that there is always more to life than what often gets perceived.
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