Rahul Bhatt, Alka Yagnik, Shabna Azmi talk about their fathers

Rahul Bhatt:

“My dad (Mahesh Bhatt) is an exceptional man. He taught me the biggest risk in life is to not take a risk at all and that  nothing helps you succeed like failure.”

Bappi Lahiri: “My father (musician Apresh Lahiri) taught me that work is worship and and that being a good human being is more important than bring successful.”

Alka Yagnik: “My father my hero my role model taught me tolerance and compassion for all.”
 

Shabana Azmi:  My earliest memory of Abba (father Kaifi Azmi) is that of him sitting on a writing table in his kurta-pyjama  smoking incessantly and writing till the wee hours of  the morning. As a child, I was convinced a poet was a euphemism  for someone who didn’t have any work.

Daddies were supposed to put on trousers, shirts and ties and go out to work. In fact  when  people would ask me what my father did, I said he  was a businessman and  quickly changed the topic. Oh, the follies of innocence… My father was a   really gorgeous looking man with this beautiful voice. People don’t know this, but he had a tremendous sense of humour.

I remember once I was putting eye-drops in his tiny eyes and the drops kept falling all over his face. He told me about this inept prince who was taught archery and who broke everything in  the house during practice. 

Then he said, ‘Put  the drops in my ears they’ll go in my eyes.’

He said such lines with a poker face. He always made digs at the strange procedure in our films where tunes came first and lyrics were written into them later.

‘It’s like first digging a grave and then trying to fit a corpse into it. But I constantly keep fitting  the corpse into the grave, so everyone thinks I’m a good lyricist’ he said. You know I took my father for granted, as all children tend to. But as a poet he continues to overwhelm me, each day even four years after his death. Whether it was his poem Makaan or Aurat… they’ve  been a great source of inspiration.

My concern for slum-dwellers started with my father’s poem Makaan which  talks of  the irony of  the construction worker who builds  a building with his sweat and blood  but isn’t allowed  to enter  it. In Hindi cinema, along with Sahir, Majrooh, Jaan Nissar Akhtar and Shailendra, my father raised  the standards of film lyrics.

They were often deceptively conversational  --

Kuch dil ne kaha…..kuch bhi nahin...

As a film lyricist he was a mixture of simplicity and poeticality.

Take these lines
Kissi  ka na  ho jiss pe saaya mujheaisi din  aisi  raat do/
Main manzil to khud dhoond loongi mere haath main zaraa apna haath do/
Qadam-do-qadam tum mera saath  do….

And when Lataji sang these lines by my father… what can be said? You know what was exceptional about my father? He  never spoke at  home about  his work.

My most favourite Kaifi Azmi lyrics?

Hmmmmm…
Koi kaise yeh bataaye ke wohtanha kyon hai/
who  jo apna tha who aur kisika kyon  hai/
yehi duniya hai to phir aisi yeh duniya kyon  hai/
yehi hota hai to aakhir yehi hota kyon hai?…

The simplicity of these lines kill me. Imagine, a spouse-deserted woman (in the film Arth) being faced with these lines!….

That sense of  commitment which artistes of my father’s generation had has been missing. But slowly it’s coming back in my film fraternity. I like it when film people come out to involve themselves with social issues.”