Gulzar has never made a secret of the high esteem in which he holds Ghalib. Time and again he has chosen to use entire verses of Ghalib's, with and without modification, in his film as well as non-film poetry. But this time he's spun a yarn around a couplet by one of Urdu poetry's other famous masters: Jigar Moradabadi.
yeh 'ishq nahii.n aasaa.N, bas itnaa samajh leeje
ik aag kaa daryaa hai, aur Doob ke jaanaa hai
Here's what Gulzar has done with (or should we say "done to"?) this couplet in Kaminey (2009) --
yeh 'ishq nahii.n aasaa.N, ajii AIDS kaa Khatraa hai
patwaar pahan jaanaa, yeh aag kaa daryaa hai
Of course, Gulzar is not pretending to do serious poetry here. Rather, he has set out to write "nonsense verse" using the highly popular Jigar couplet as basis, and I must say he has passed with flying colours! ;-) The 'lateral thinking' reference to AIDS is funny enough, but don't ignore the use of patwaar (rudder) to convey ... ruBBer (nirodh)! The tune by Vishal Bhardwaj, and the very apt vocals by Sukhwinder Singh and Kailash Kher are no less successful.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment