A man of words

From writing love letters for his friends to penning award-winning lyrics for Bollywood hits, Irshad Kamil has come a long way

Paschim Express. Coach number AS3. Seat number 64. Date: March 31, 2000.” Irshad Kamil, the poet-lyricist who recently won his second Filmfare award for Best Lyrics for “Nadaan Parindey” in Rockstar, remembers every detail of the journey that put his life on a new track and brought him from Chandigarh to Mumbai nearly 12 years ago.

He was 28 years old then. After a PhD in Hindi from Panjab University, Chandigarh, he had worked as a reporter for The Tribune and The Indian Express. He had also acted in some plays and, along with like-minded young people, helped set up ‘Theatre Age’, an organisation which hoped to transform the lives of street children through theatre besides giving them an education.

“Those were the days when I was searching for myself, looking for direction and meaning,” says Kamil. During this period, Lekh Tandon, who has directed several films including Jhuk Gaya Aasman (1968), Amrapali (1966) and Professor (1962) as well as television serials, came to Chandigarh. He was looking for someone who would write a script for a TV serial and zeroed in on Kamil. Among the serials that followed were Kartavya, Chhoti Ma and Sanjeevani. A meeting with musician-composer Sandesh Shandilya took him to Bollywood and Kamil’s first film as a lyricist was released in 2004 — the Kareena Kapoor-Rahul Bose starrer Chameli. Counted as one of the most promising lyricist of present times, he has since doled out hits for popular films such as Jab We Met, Love Aaj Kal, Neal n Nikki, A Wednesday, Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai and Rockstar.

The essence of the song for which he won his first Filmfare lay in the six words written by the legendary and much-loved poet from Punjab, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, who died in 1973 at the young age of 37: “Aaj din chadeya tere rang warga”. At a time lyricists have no compunctions about passing off someone else’s words as their own, Kamil took permission from Batalvi’s wife, Aruna. The audio CDs of the film gave credit to the poet and Kamil also dedicated his Filmfare award to Batalvi.

In “Nadaan Parindey”, too, Kamil has borrowed a couple of lines from the 12th century Sufi saint Baba Farid — “Kaga sab tan khaiyo, mera chun chun khaiyo maas/ Do naina mat khaiyo mohe piya milan ki aas”, which has been rendered by various singers, including Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Kailash Kher, Sonu Niigaam and also on Coke Studio Pakistan. “Open page 83 of the Punjab Board Hindi textbook and you will find this poem by Baba Farid in it,” says Kamil who has passionately read the works of Sufi saints like Sultan Bahu, Bulleh Shah, Kabir, Tulsidas, Surdas and many more.

Kamil does not come from a family of poets or writers. His father worked in the chemistry department of the Government College, Malerkotla, a city in Punjab’s Sangrur district where Kamil was born. And, like “every middle-class family which lives with insecurities”, says Kamil, he wanted his son to take up science. Kamil says he had no choice but to relent. But when the first year results came out, he’d been bowled out in Maths and Physics. Writing in his blog, “My Best Failures,” Kamil says in evident glee, “And I divorced her (science).”

Science to poetry was an easy transition. “My handwriting’s nice, so my friends in college would ask me to write their love letters for them. In every letter, I would try to put down some couplets,” says Kamil. Initially, he would borrow from the great poets. “But how much can you borrow and how far can you go on repeating poems? So, I decided to write my own poems.” 

While writing for himself is one thing — “it’s liberating,” says the poet who continues to attend mushairas — penning lyrics for films is another game altogether. “Ninety nice per cent of times, songs are written to music,” says Kamil.

The longest it’s taken him to write a song is 10 days — “Hawa Hawa” for Rockstar. “It was shot in Prague. I wanted to use a Czech folk tale, “Sleepy John”, which has three characters. Rahman had put some gibberish as part of the composition which [Rockstar director] Imtiaz Ali wanted to retain. And, it was a dance number. There were too many points of focus and I had to do justice to all.” Kamil pulled it off beautifully. 

More challenges lie ahead, says the lyricist whose future projects include Ajay Devgn’s Son of Sardar and Akshay Kumar’s Special 26. He realises that as an artist, he is as good as his last work.