ham dekhnewaaloN kii nazar dekh rahe haiN

Ustad Dagh Dehlvi was as prolific as his verse was captivating. He had this great ability to compose couplets that were easy to understand (at least for the average Urdu/Hindi speaker of his day), and capture very simple, yet alluring images in those couplets. That's very much the same goal that film lyricists have: they want the songs they write to be memorable, and a song that's easy to understand is easy to memorize, hai na?. Little wonder, therefore, that a number of his works have been adapted into film songs time and again. In this post, we visit the matla of a Ghazal by Dagh that has been used not once but twice by different lyric writers in different films. The couplet is simply too good! -- sab log jidhar woh hain udhar dekh rahe hain ham dekhnewaalon ki nazar dekh rahe hain The first recorded use of this verse we know of is in the film Gyarah Hazaar Ladkiyan (1962) by none other than Majrooh Sultanpuri. The song is set as a cabaret song in a restaurant, with Helen on the screen lipsynching Asha's vocals for music director N. Dutta. Gyarah Hazaar Ladkiyan is a movie that was ostensibly based on the life of the emerging new woman of India -- the 11,000 working women in various jobs in the roaring metropolis of Mumbai (then, Bombay). Here's the song. Doesn't Helen look cute? As we can see, Majrooh used Dagh's words verbatim, with no modification or alteration. About a decade later, in the film Sabak (1973), Saawan Kumar (credited as "Sawan") reused the same couplet, with a very small modification; he writes: woh jidhar dekh rahe hain, sab udhar dekh rahe hain ham to bas dekhnewaalon ki nazar dekh rahe hain Such a minor change that it is 100% obvious where the couplet is copied from, right? This time it's Suman Kalyanpur singing under Usha Khanna's baton. The "singer" on the screen is Poonam, Shatrughan Sinha's wife! Not sure Dagh could have ever imagined that his verse would figure in cabarets and party songs!