Noel Coward once wrote, "strange how potent cheap music is." With a little bit of tweaking one could say strange how potent Hindi film music is. Whether it is Atlanta or Aram Nagar, the pull of Hindi film music is extraordinary, uniting diasporas across South Asia. And few people are able to articulate its allure as well as Javed Akhtar who turned lyricist only with Silsila in 1981, and only because its director Yash Chopra met all his impossible conditions. After seven generations of poets, Akhtar said he had no intention of following the family tradition and remained a staunch writer of prose. But the closet poet in him was outed by Chopra who persuaded Akhtar to write the lyrics of Silsila. One of the reasons Akhtar agreed was that Silsila's hero, Amit (played by Amitabh Bachchan), was a poet. So was born the iconic song, 'Dekha ek khwab toh yeh silsile hue'. His second assignment as a lyricist also saw the lead being a poet and so was born the Jagjit Singh ghazal, 'Tumko dekha toh yeh khayal aaya', in Raman Kumar's Saath Saath (1982). "I wrote it in nine minutes after nine pegs of whisky—those days I would be drinking heavily," he adds. Perhaps one of his finest romantic songs, which continues its reign in the hearts of people, is 'Ek ladki ko dekha toh aisa laga' for 1942: A Love Story (1994), which he composed for RD Burman, and which had 27 similes. Words, magical words. The most difficult thing to write, though, he says is gibberish, which he did so well in the introduction to the song for Mr India (1987): 'Hawa Hawaii'. "Chi ho ho Honolulu lu lu lu Honolulu/ Hing biki Hong Kong, King Kong/I see Nusy, you see Lucy/Assi tussi, lassi pissi/ Mombasa ping pong." Mombasa was a word he got stuck on and it took him a long while to find it to fit into the song. Apparently, it came to him in a dream. And now it's a classic. "One has to write according to the intellect of the characters in the movie," says Akhtar. "If it is a poet, you use one kind of language and if you're told to write nonsense, it has to be done in another way. Let me tell you though, writing nonsense is very difficult, although one hears a lot of it these days."

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