Tere haathon ke likhe khat...

This one takes me back to 1986 when I was about 22 years old and had the pleasure of spending a lovely evening and breathing the same air as the great Kaifi Azmi. The one and only time that I had the pleasure of doing so.

Call it youthful exuberance, cockiness, excitement or simply my eagerness to impress the great poet with my 'knowledge' of urdu shayari, I managed to strike a conversation with him and proceeded to tell him how wonderful I found his poetry and how I appreciated his lyrics in the film, Arth. When asked by him which one I liked the most, I promptly responded by half singing (I used to imagine/consider myself to be Jagjit Singh's younger brother those days...ha ha) half reciting the first few lines of a nazm which was unfortunately not a part of the film but seemed like an extension of the famous "Koi yeh kaise bataye...", the famous nazm penned by Kaifi sahab.

I sang, "Teri khushboo mein base khat mein jalata kaise
Pyar mien doobe hue khat mein jalata kaise
Tere haaton ke likhe khat mein jalata kaise
Tere khat aaj mein Ganga mein baha aya hoon
Aag behete hue paani mein laga aya hoon"

After patiently hearing me out, Kaifi sahab commented, "Bahut khoob! Bahut achha likha hai par afsos yeh maine nahin likha hai"

I was dumbstruck, nonplussed and thought that Kaifi Azmi was probably joking with me as I was quite sure that what I had just recited/sung had been written by him like all the other lyrics in the film, but his comment shut me up for good that evening.

It was only more than two decades later and thanks to Google baba and YouTube that I realised that indeed that piece was not penned by Kaifi sahab but by a gentleman called Rajindar Nath 'Rehbar'.

While it was a big oops and a faux-pas moment for me, the fact remains that it is a most beautiful and tender nazm, rendered ever so beautifully by the man who brought the ghazal to me, the one and only Jagjit Singh.

Incidentally, last night I met an ex-IAS officer, who was also a former MD of HMV, and was responsible for giving Jagjit Singh his first big break in 1976 by recognising his talent and offering to cut the iconic LP, 'Unforgettables', with him. Heard some most interesting anecdotes from him, but that will be another post, another day.

For now, listen to this beautiful but relatively less heard number......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Rwc4oh5Znw&feature=youtube_gdata_player