
And today I happened to meet Sameer ji too. this is what Bakshi ji told lyricist Sameer a few months before he passed away – ” “… I am not scared of dying. are immortality is known. What I am sad about is that if I die, due to this recent illness, so many songs, poems, emotions, which are still inside me will die with me. I wish I could give them to you, but I cannot how much ever I wish to, and that’s only because they came with me and have to leave with me alone. And that makes me sad, that they will remain unsaid.’
Sameer told me ‘rakesh, can you imagine the passion of this man! he was not afraid of death because he will not last, he was sad that his death will mean that so many songs still within him that he knows he can still write still express still share will die with him. even in death he was only thinking of writing songs, more songs. He still had so much more to say at 70 plus!’
And something similar rajkumar bharjatya said when he met AB in 1966 or 1967, after he wrote the songs of Taqdeer Bakshi ji told him, “you wanted two verses, I have written 6. you keep what you like from them, just give me a chance to write. that’s all I want, a chance to write.”
It all comes together like a jigsaw puzzle, he lived not for us, or for money or fame. he just wanted to pour the songs he believed have come with him and will go away with him too.
Most biographies I have read, and filmmakers I have met, I realized they suffered immense grief in their formative years or youth, or as adults. A story teller, an artist, comes to his craft by being bruised, shattered in some way. Only when they came to know the language of grief that they were born as the creative people we know them to be. This was also mentioned by mahesh bhatt. Two events I have heard my father speak of as traumatic are, his mother dying when he was 5 or 9, and the partition, leaving your place of birth and childhood in forced, violent, traumatic circumstances. he had said he saw women and children raped and burnt and hung from trees and poles and those images never left him for over 60 years he had told his LIC agent and friend Mr Puri. Mr Puri mentioned that to me. Those tragedies shaped him, sadly, but truly.
– Told to me – Rakesh Anand Bakshi