Poet Of The Screen

Chairing a session about Gulzar’s songs for a literature festival a few years ago, I had a minor panic attack midway through a question.

- Jai Arjun Singh

Chairing a session about Gulzar’s songs for a literature festival a few years ago, I had a minor panic attack midway through a question. It happened when I remembered that the man sitting on the next chair had written lyrics for Bimal Roy’s stark social drama Bandini in the early 1960s, and nearly half a century later, for Anurag Kashyap’s surreal No Smoking, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola and Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire—bridging filmmaking epochs, and movies so varied in tone, technique and sensibility that they might be completely different art forms.