Sarhadon par tanav hai kya / zara pata toh karo chunav hai kya (Is there tension on the border / Find out if there’s an election round the corner).” Then again, “Shakhon se toot jayein woh pattey nahi hain hum / Andhi se koi kah de ki auqat mein rahe (I am not one of those leaves that falls away from a branch / Tell the storm to stay in its limits)”
Rahat Indori
was a
poet of mushairas
, whose work was much loved and enjoyed by the audience. To his credit, he never lowered his standard of poetry to please them. He was also the bestpaid shayar at
mushairas
,” says noted poet Hasan Kamal. Indori’s association with Hindi cinema was fruitful. He wrote lyrics in over 20 films and worked with Vidhu Vinod Chopra for Kareeb (1998), Mission Kashmir (2000) and Munnabhai MBBS (2003). Bumbro bumbro (film: Mission Kashmir) was one of his biggest hits.
Last year, Trinamool MP Mohua Mitra recalled one of his poems which ended with the line, “Kisi ke baap ka Hindustan thodi hai” in Parliament. The viral speech reintroduced the poem written three decades ago to a generation of Indians.
A social media regular,
Indori
had over 860k followers on Twitter. After testing Covid positive, he requested people not to call him saying he would keep updating his status. That was his last tweet.
In a mushaira in Aurangabad this January, Rahat reacted, in his inimitable style, after being called a‘jihadi’ by some on social media. He recited the following lines “Main mar jaoon toh meri alag pehchan likh dena / Lahoo se meri peshani pe Hindustan likh dena. (When I die make a separate identity for me / Write Hindustan on my forehead with blood).
(With inputs from Ashutosh Shukla in Bhopal
& Antriksh Singh in Indore)