July 24, 2022. Dallas, TX. This day for me was like a kid in a candy store. Coming face to face with the person who defined better part of your childhood, his penning of words had captured too many of your happy and sad moments. I am not easily enamored by a performer and there are only few who would make me not lose up on opportunity.
The stories you have enjoyed on celluloid, the songs you have hummed and the ones who have been reverberating in your earpiece have been penned by him, the dialogs that you may have spoken in front of the mirror, the acting that you have enjoyed has his signature direction and the list goes on. This felt like our entire childhood to adolescence to young years moved like a train and flashed in front of you. One might wonder who I am talking about. I am talking about a man who is more multitalented than the word multitalented. I am talking about none other than the legend Gulzar himself.
Gulzar was born in a Sikh family as Sampooran Singh Kalra, he was a sampooran kalakar and entertainer as his name’s meaning suggests. Closer look at his accolades and you marvel at the longevity and latitude and the longitude that the aura of this man spread over. I don’t know of any other Indian legend who has won 22 Filmfare awards, 7 national awards, 1 Grammy and 1 Oscar (Academy) award along with the prestigious Dadasaheb Phalke award and we are not done yet and this was not even the man in front of the camera.
Gulzarsaab was unique in his ability to express himself admirably in the two languages that Hindustani literature is primarily written in – Hindi and Urdu. His commendable command of the lexicon of these two languages has been awe inspiring. Some of the words that he has used in his poetry or prose have only been added to the vocabulary after he made the world aware of them, at least to us mere mortals.
What makes his poetry even more compelling and his lyrics even more rhythmic is his ability to collaborate with and create magic with the man who was possibly equally challenged in the very same languages that Gulzarsaab called home, another genius Rahul Dev Burman. Pancham as he was called was another true genius who was not his fluent best in Hindi, let alone Urdu and yet Gulzar’s lyrics and RD’s music created a rendezvous that was one of its kind and add to that the genius of the third one like Kishore Kumar and this was the best tandem one could imagine when three of these geniuses enthralled and regaled the audience.
What was also incredible was the body of work that Gulzarsaab produced and parsing through his creations felt like walking into a high-end jewelry store and marveling at one jewel after the other. There was no genre that one could feel the maestro couldn’t dabble in and if you look at some of his penned creations, you could see a gamut from Jungle Book Song to songs in Aandhi, Mausam and Ijazat and the other end of the spectrum being Kajra Re, Bidi Jalai Le and Chhaiya Chhaiya total peppy numbers which get your feet moving unconditionally. I haven’t come across someone with plethora of skills from poetry to prose to screenplay and being absolute top-drawer quality in all and yet churning out the body of work that he did over the years. Gulzarsaab did wonders by offering his own tribute to someone who inspired him by making a tele serial on Mirza Ghalib and bringing the life of a great poet to the generations who never had the opportunity to experience.
Gulzarsaab had some incredible collaborations – RD already mentioned above but Sanjeev Kumar was yet another powerhouse who plied his trade the best under the incredible leadership and guidance of Gulzarsaab. Likewise we can thank him for Vishal Bhardwaj who has brought the stories of Shakespeare and localized and ported for UP heartland. Gulzarsaab even extracted some of their career best performances from Jeetendra and Vinod Khanna. He himself mentioned that when he lost both Sanjeev Kumar and RD, that was a big loss for him. The list can go on and on but this is a tribute to the man as a whole and not his individual pieces of art that he produced.
I would just keep this as my humble tribute to this incredible artist that he has been and consider myself fortunate to have been born in the same era and it was a dream come true to see him perform in close quarters. What an innings par excellence this has been, and one can only thank God for Gulzarsaab.
