Urdu Academy of North America Pays Tributes to Javed Akhtar
By AbdusSattar Ghazali
The Urdu Academy of North America dedicated its July 21, 2019 session to the life and work of prominent Urdu poet, lyricist and scriptwriter Javed Akhtar.
Jafar Shah presided over the event. DrMaheen Adamson was the MC. She presented a well-researched maqala about Javed Akhtar.
As usual, a number of Urdu enthusiasts recited the poetry of Javed Akhtar: Urdu Academy of North America, Javed Akhtar, DrMaheen Adamson, Almas Shabani, NageshAvadhany, Arshad Rashid, Jafar Shah, Irfan Siddiqui, Tasadduq Hussain Attari, Zeba Rizvi, MehboobAlam, MukeshKackar, AsimBajwa, and AbdusSattarGhazali.
Almas Shabvani, Sulaikha Chaudhry and DrMaheen Adamson enraptured the audience with their melodious presentation of Javed Akhtar’s poetry.
Akhtar was born in Gwalior State (now Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh) to Jan Nisar Akhtar, a Bollywood film songwriter and Urdu poet, and singer Safia Akhtar, a teacher and writer. His lineage can be traced back to seven generations of writers.
The highly respected Urdu poet Majaz was his maternal uncle and the works of his grandfather, MuzterKhairabadi, are looked upon as a milestone in Urdu poetry. Akhtar has one sibling; his younger brother is renowned psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar.
After his birth, his parents moved to Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, and later to Aligarh. Young Javed Akhtar lost his mother at a tender age and his father frequently moved back and forth between Lucknow and Bombay, so he and his brother spent most of their time with relatives.
Akhtar arrived in Mumbai in October 1964. In his early years of living in Mumbai, he managed to write the dialogue for a minor film. Occasionally, he used to work as an assistant.
His father Jan Nisar Akhtar was also a famous Urdu poet. Javed's original name was Jadoo, taken from a line in a poem written by his father - "Lamba, lambakisijadookafasanahoga". He was given an official name of Javed since it was the closest to the word jadoo.
Akhtar continues to be prominent in Bollywood and is a sought-after lyricist. In the early part of his career he was a screenplay writer, creating movies like Deewar, Janzeer and Sholay. Later, he left screenplay writing and became a lyricist and social-political activist
Javed Akhtar is the father of film director Farhan Akhtar; the father and son duo have worked together in movies such as DilChahta Hai, Lakhshya, Rock On, etc. The script of these movies was written by Javed Akhtar.
Some of his most successful works were in the late 1970s and 1980s with Salim Khan as half of the script-writing duo credited as Salim-Javed. Javed Akhtar has not worked with his old associate Salim Khan, the father of Salman, Arbaz, and Sohail Khan since they split up.
Akhtar was married to Honey Irani, a script-writer for Hindi films, with whom he had two children, Farhan Akhtar and Zoya Akhtar, both film directors.
After Javed's divorce with Irani, he married actress ShabanaAzmi, the daughter of another famous Urdu poet, KaifiAzmi.
He is a recipient of the Padma Shri (1999), Padma Bhushan (2007), the SahityaAkademi Award as well as five National Film Awards.
The first collection of Javed Akhtar’s poetry, Tarkash, meaning ‘quiver’ was published in 1995. It established him as a writer of nazm. With his second volume, Lava, we see him dabbling in both the ghazal and the nazm and many critics rate his ghazals as being superior to his nazms.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
