New Delhi: On his 70th birthday Saturday, writer-filmmaker Subhash Ghai, credited with movies like “Karz”, “Hero”, “Karma”, “Saudagar”, “Khalnayak”, “Pardes” and “Taal”, has spoken fondly of his lesser known talent as a lyricist.
He says penning poetry comes from the experience of writing scripts and dialogues for films, automatically.
“Actually, as a writer I wrote the story of the film (‘Yaadein’), (its) script and dialogues. When a dialogue writer writes the script, automatically the poetry comes from dialogues. When words (are) strung together, you can create poetry from dialogues,” Ghai said during a radio interview on a 92.7 BIG FM show.
Ghai not only wrote the dialogues for “Jogger’s Park” (2003), but also the lyrics of some of the songs in the film. However, he doesn’t consider himself a professional writer.
“During filming of ‘Jogger’s Park’, when Bakshi sahab was not around, the songs were written by three to four writers… So whenever a song’s tune was made, I would immediately pen down some lyrics. So for example, the songs ‘Jogger’s park’, ‘Kabhi pa liya to kabhi kho diya’ and ‘Khelenge khelenge’ (‘Iqbal’) were written by me,” he said.
The filmmaker says his love for writing dates back to 1955.
“I have been writing since 1955. I was about 12 years then. So the first piece I wrote was an essay for my school magazine. Then I wrote a story, (followed by) plays and then in college I started writing my own stories, directing and even acting in them … . I loved writing and reading stories, I used to read a lot of them.”
Ghai feels although films are a visual medium, if written well, their true beauty comes out. Citing the example of Aamir Khan-starrer “PK”, he said: “…movies like ‘PK’, not just their story but their characters are beautifully etched out too. Movies work and credit must go to writers because they bring the story to life.”