The bade dinon ke bard Anand Bakshi had the knack of expressing the most complex sentiments in the simplest words.
Yash Chopra once recalled an incident that proved Bakshi’s supremacy among lyricists. This happened during the recordings of the songs for Yash Chopra’s Darr in 1983. The chartbuster song Jadoo teri nazar was being written.
Recalled Yash Chopra, “We were all there at the brainstorming session, when the song Jadoo teri nazar was being written and composed. Bakshi Saab with whom I was working as a director for the first time chipped in, ‘I think I have just summed up the theme of your film in this line Tu haan kar ya na kar tu hai meri Kiran.’ At first I was taken aback and then it hit me that Bakshi Saab had indeed nailed the entire plot of Darr in that one line: tu haan kar ya na kar tu hai meri Kiran.”
Yash Chopra and Anand Bakshi didn’t work together in too many films. Yash Chopra was a diehard devotee of Sahir Ludhianvi’s poetry. Chopra and Bakshi were meant to work together in Gulshan Rai’s Joshila. But Yash insisted on Sahir. It was only after Sahir’s demise that Chopra worked with Bakshi, first in Chandni and then Darr.
Anand Bakshi was a lyricist first, then a poet. He understood the requirement of film lyrics better than any other lyricist. The songs had to be integrated into the script. Filmmakers like Raj Kapoor, Raj Khosla and Subhash Ghai would narrate their screenplays to Bakshi who would immediately start writing out the songs into their screenplays.
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