Sahir Ludhianvi aka Abdul Hayee is having a bit of a moment with actor Danish Husain's play Main Pal Do Pal Ka Shayar Hoon, which is the title of the song he famously wrote for Amitabh Bachchan in Yash Chopra's Kabhie Kabhie (1976). The poet, whose songs defined a generation's angst in movies such as Baazi (1951) and Pyaasa (1957) was as mercurial as he was brilliant. His work has been the subject of serious, scholarly work but it is only now that he is being rediscovered in the popular domain. Husain is a former Standard Chartered banker in Delhi who quit in 2014 to follow his passion in acting. He came across the works of Ludhianvi when he did a session at an Urdu literary festival with singer Vidya Shah on progressive writers and poets such as Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaifi Azmi. The play is the outcome of two manuscripts, one by Ali Hussain Mir on Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of Progressive Urdu Poetry, and the other, Dastan-e- Sahir, written by Himanshu Bajpai. "I asked the two of them to hand over their scripts to me. I edited, restructured and gave it its present shape." The end result: The play opened to full houses in Mumbai in September 2023 and the response has only risen with each enactment. "Sahir was a complex, enigmatic man," says Husain, who has done similar work on Begum Akhtar, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Alla Rakha. The house in which Ludhianvi once lived, in Juhu, Mumbai, is now the subject of litigation between his surviving relatives, even as his books and records lie eaten by termites. He was one of the earliest writers to demand that Hindi film lyricists be credited by All India Radio. His unrequited love for poet Amrita Pritam is also part of the legend that surrounds him as is his feud with singer Lata Mangeshkar. His poetry, poignant and powerful, is as relevant now as it was in post- Independent India. After all, it took a particular kind of courage to question Nehru's India at the height of Nehruvian India in his Pyaasa song: 'Jinhe naaz hai Hind par woh kahan hai'.

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