At dusk, poet moves from haunting songs to silence of haiku

(It was a dream come true to get an opportunity to interview my namesake Gopaldas Neeraj, the legendary lyricist i was named after. The piece appeared in Hindustan Times in February 2012)

Born in Kashmir, the land of lakes, I had assumed my father had named me after the lotus. But on a snowy afternoon, when we were listening to old songs on the radio secure under many layers of woolens in our century-old, wooden, ancestral house, my father casually mentioned that he had named me after the writer of the song that was playing: ‘Megha chhaye aadhi raat, bairan ban gaye nindiyan.’

I realised that the noted poet and songwriter Neeraj was not just my namesake but the man my poet father had named me after.

After all these years, I interviewed the 88-year-old man who wrote immortal numbers like ‘Phoolon ke rang se’, ‘Shokhiyon mein ghola jaye phoolon ka shabaab’, ‘Dil aj shayar hai’, ‘Mera mann tera pyaasa’ and ‘Maine kasam li’, sitting at a government guest house in Bhopal on a sunny Friday morning, bottles of last night’s whisky by the bedside.

“Don’t ask me about movies,” said Gopaldas Neeraj, whom many put in the league of our very best lyricists like Sahir Ludhianvi. “I have quit writing for films long ago. Music directors for whom I wrote, Jaikishan and SD Burman, died. It left me very depressed and I decided to quit the industry.”

But soon the man with a frail body in a large frame, with flowing grey hair and bushy eyebrows, start chatting about his old comrades — Sahir, Josh, Jigar, Bachchan, Firaaq, Makhan Lal Chaturvedi and other greats of Hindi literature.

“I miss Sahir. I still remember he organised a special mushaiyra for me,” he said.

Like the old Zen master, these days Neeraj composes haikus (poems in just 17 syllables) and dohas, or couplets. “I am writing haikus in Hindi and will publish them soon. You can’t write them actually. Such moments happen and you just record them,” he said.

He is not entirely disenchanted with this generation of lyricists. He likes the work of Gulzar, Javed Akhtar and Prasoon Joshi. He said like a cyclical process, songwriting is again improving in Bollywood after reaching its low point in the ’80s and ’90s.

However, he is not too sure if a young songwriter would do well in career today.

“Our education system is MBA-oriented, job-oriented. It doesn’t encourage free thinking. It just encourages materialism,” he said. He, in fact, holds the education system responsible for the decline of social values and rise in corruption.

As we talk, his attendant for last ten years, Om Bahadur, a man in his late twenties, served butter toast and tea. After the tea, Bahadur helped him take medicines — five pills from different packs and small plastic cases.

He then turned to his special relationship with Osho, who was born just a few hours’ away from Bhopal.

“Osho was my friend. He would send me his books for which I wrote introductions, like his Gita commentary series and Sadhana Path. He invited me to the Pune ashram and organised the first ever mushaiyra for me there,” he said. “Osho is the most original thinker India has ever produced. He is yet to be understood fully by those in the rat race and by governments, be it at the Centre or here in MP.”

The Padmashree awardee comes across somebody who does not bother about most mundane things like dates, awards, media attention, luxuries, movies or money at the dusk of his life. After six decades of poetic journey, he seemed a Sufi fakir who understood the language of love and its transcendence from words to silence.