Anand Bakshi: The people’s writer

An extraordinarily talented lyricist, Anand Bakshi’s words continue to enthral millions of listeners

Many have earned the name of ‘People’s Poet’ over the decades. Anand Bakshi, who passed away 20 years ago on March 30, however, is the ‘People’s Writer’.

One of the few Hindi cinema lyricists who passed away when still at the top, it was said of Bakshi that if one listens to his repertoire, one would learn everything about life. ‘Accha to hum chalte hain’, ‘Tirchhi topiwale’, ‘Gaadi bula rahi hai’, ‘Chitthi aayi hai’, and ‘Solah baras ki bali umar’ are but fragments of his infinite genius.

Amazingly versatile, Bakshi could make even simple words sound profound. Like his most frequent composer team Laxmikant-Pyarelal (with whom he did over 300 of his documented 635 films), he believed that showing off one’s skills at the expense of the script was unacceptable.

Anand Bakshi also worked a lot with R.D. Burman, Kalyanji-Anandji, S.D. Burman, Rajesh Roshan, and Anu Malik, and veterans like (Shankar-) Jaikishan ( Main Sundar Hoon), Roshan ( Devar) and others. The young lot includes A.R. Rahman ( Taal), M.M. Kreem ( Zakham), Viju Shah ( Tridev), and Jatin-Lalit ( Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge). He has also worked with Shiv-Hari, Nadeem-Shravan, and Uttam Singh and more.

Composer Ismail Darbar shared his experiences about Bakshi, who worked in his Mehbooba (2008), “He would write 8 to 10 antaras for every song, each relevant to the situation, perfect to the metre of the tune, and would ask us to take our pick. Bakshi-ji was something else!”

A firm believer in both destiny and hard work, Bakshi effortlessly wrote the song, ‘Haathon ki chand lakeeron ka’ for Vidhaata, where two friends, Shammi Kapoor and Dilip Kumar, sang about their respective beliefs in the supremacy of taqdeer (fate) and tadbir (efforts). “When Bakshi-saab thought of this concept in my version of The Godfather, I rewrote the plot. He would grasp a film’s story probably better than us filmmakers,” said the film’s director Subhash Ghai.

This association, which began with Gautam Govinda (1979), and went on to include mega-musicals such as Karz, Hero, Karma, Ram Lakhan, Saudagar, Khal-Nayak, Pardes and Taal, was just one of the many long-lasting bonds that Bakshi forged with filmmakers as varied as Manmohan Desai, L.V. Prasad, Yash Chopra, Raj Khosla, Ramesh Sippy, Shakti Samanta, J. Om Prakash, Rajiv Rai and many others.