Dr.rahat Indori Leaves To Live Forever

Ali Peter John

God was in a state of excitement after he has finished creating the world and was about to create his most wonderful creation , MAN . He was happy after he had created the first man and realized that man needed a companion and so created a woman and began God's long experiment of creating different kinds of human beings . He was not satisfied with the kind of human being he was creating and so decided to create some extraordinary humans and took one big step and created writers , novelists , short story writers and poets .

He had his own plan of creating this class of humans .He blessed them with the unique ability to be several human beings in one . And that was the beginning of the world having poets besides the writers and other creative and sensitive beings who were marked out from all the other creations of God.... And poets were in a class of their own as they could give expression to the feelings of all their fellow human beings , the countries they were born in , the world and even God .

I have had the good fortune of being among and spending time with some of the best poets writing in different languages of India and I have always believed that a poet is special because he has a world of his own within him .And one such poet was Dr.Rahat Indori ,who I had a few opportunities to meet when he was writing lyrics for some Hindi films in the eighties and nineties ....

He had come to Bombay with the same objective of some of the other known poets , it was the need to let their poems reach a larger audience through films and to make a little more money and give a comfortable life to themselves and their families .

I used to find it difficult to believe how a poet with such a reputation could match his calibre as a poet with composers , directors and producers who hardly knew anything about poetry , but he worked out a way of dealing with them without making any compromises and continued to write songs for the kind of films being made at that time. And I could see and feel that his heart was not in what he was doing and I could also see that he would leave the scene one day soon like some other well-known poets of the Hindi and Urdu language had .

I must mention it here that only some big poets who survived in the film industry in Bombay were Sahir Ludhianvi , perhaps the only poet who worked on his own terms and conditions , Majrooh Sultanpuri , who could even make compromises and Kaifi Azmi , who wrote a limited number of songs in the films he believed in .

Dr.Indori worked the most with Anu Malik(and what a strange combination it was ) and among the other composers he teamed up with were Shankar-Ehsan -Loy and A.R.Rehman .

The only time he was genuinely satisfied was when he wrote the songs for M.F.Husain's "Meenaxi-A tale of two cities''. He had very good vibes with Husain Sahab who had a very strong weakness for Urdu poets and their poetry . It was almost the last film for which he wrote songs and then gave up and went back to his first love , reciting ghazals and shairs at different mushaairas held all over the country , Pakistan and the Gulf States and was a star among poets and was treated better than a star anywhere.....

What Dr.Indori felt about writing for films can be felt in this one little story .He was writing the songs of a film for which Anu Malik was scoring the music . The producers who knew nothing about poetry showed Dr.Indori a line written in Urdu and insisted that he include the line in one of his lyrics .

Dr.Indori kept telling him that the line was from a poem written by Mirza Ghalib and that he could not include the line because if he did , he would become the laughing stock in his fraternity and they would get into trouble . The producer thought for a while and then told Dr.Indori ,"kaun hai ye Ghalib ? Ek do hazar de do aur niptaa do usse "it was a story that Dr.Indori could not forget and he said , he had many other stories like this where producers , directors and composers had tried to "teach"him how to write poetry .....

Dr.Indori later went on to be one of the leading poets who wrote about the realities of life and love , but he reached the peak of his popularity when he openly and fearlessly took digs against Modi and his government .He was the voice of dissent and some of the lines he wrote had made him "a hero of the voice of the masses ". One of his all-time lines was which I roughly quote his "iss mitti mein shaamil hai har kisi ka khoon , ye kisi ke baap ka hindustan thoda hai ?" The line grew into an anthem of revolt against the Modi government which had once called him a"Jihaadi ",to which he wrote a line in which he asked that his grave be inscribed in blood that he was a Hindustani.

Poets like Dr.Indori who believed that they had a conscience and they would give expression to it even at the risk of their lives, are born once in a way . And no threats and not even death could stop them. Especially in dark times when even the media is bending and breaking in one of the largest democracies in the world , can never be forgotten .Or will they ?