These days rewinding of the tape on the spool of life is taking place frequently. This may be a indicator of many things. One of them may be that the person is not at ease in the present circumstances and since one cannot run away easily, the only escape is to take shelter in the past memories.
The events of the past, good or bad, which become memories. As they have now become history and rewriting them is beyond our capacity, so begin to like them. We are lost in the reminisces!!
The childhood of every person is greener as compared to the present status. The longer you go back into the past, we were more nearer to the mother nature. Of course my memories have been stirred by watching the oldest TV channel in India. DD Bharati channel airs old recordings.
On such recording I watched a few days back, was a documentary on the revolutionary poet Makhdum Mohiuddin by Muzzaffar Ali.
Who can forget the songs of movie “Bazaar” ? This film was also made by Muzzaffar Ali. He makes a movie after a hell lot of research and has a great eye for detail. He does not seem to be bothered by the expenditure and strives to bring back the milieu of the settings of the story to life. This is called the creativity.
Makhdum Mohiuddin was born in a village in the Medak district in 1907. It was the time when the British ruled India. Hyderabad had a Nizam. Mohiuddin studied till MA and taught in a college.
He joined the marxist party of India. Many a times he went to jail. His poetry reflects the struggle of an ordinary man and the love.
Hyderabad has a strong Udru base in its own right due to being ruled by Nizams. It is also said that Nizams were richest rulers in the world though the disparity between rich and poor was very high.
Long back, he wrote one Nazm called “Ek Chameli Ke Mandve Tale” which was quite lengthy. It was a very popular song of the time. The song of Bazaar called “Phir Chhidi Baat raat phulon ki” was also hugely popular. It was sung by Lata and Talat Aziz and music was composed by the inimitable Khayaam.
In the documentary, this song was sung as a quawaali by some quawaals in such a beautiful way that it seemed even more ethereal than the song sung by Talat Aziz and Lata.
I tried unsuccessfully to find it the internet because nowhere in the documentary the names of singers appeared. Most of his poems are compiled in the book “बिसात-ए-रक़्स” . One of his poems starts with following lines.
Hayat le ke chalo, kayenat le ke chalo, chalo to sare zamane ko saath leke chalo… (Take the life with you, take the universe with you, when you go, take the people with you…)
This clearly shows that he was a people’s poet. He draw the material and ideas for his poems from the life of the common people.