Man vs Machine

At his home in Mumbai, legendary lyricist-screenwriter Javed Akhtar serves up hot takes on real creativity, artificial intelligence and what the Azmi-Akhtar clan really discuss at the dinner table.

- By JIGYASA MISHRA

I often wonder what Javed Akhtar was thinking about when he sat at his desk to write 'Dard-E-Disco'. Om Shanti Om director Farah Khan's brief was clear: Shah Rukh Khan's wheelchair-bound character is fantasising about having a six-pack and dancing shirtless among long-limbed models. Akhtar's job was to pen lyrics that described his feverdream state of mind, words so frenzied that they only barely made sense when strung together. And so we got lines like "Toh Phirta hoon main London, Paris, New York, LA, San Francisco" and "Dil tod gaya / Mujhe chhod gaya / Woh pichle mahine ki chhabbis ko" to rhyme with the chorus, "Dil mein mere hai dard-e-disco."

But because it was Akhtar, we also got eloquent Urdu. "Fasle-gul thi, gulposhiyo ka mausam tha/Hum par kabhi sargoshiyo ka mausam tha," sang Sukhwinder Singh, who once said in an interview that he recorded 'Dard-E-Disco' barefoot as it was impossible for him not to dance and he didn't want his footsteps to interfere with the sound. I'm thinking about this when the elevator doors open to a hyphenated nameplate reading 'AzmiAkhtar'. Inside the apartment, there is a panoply of paintings, quite a few Hussains. By the living room window sits Akhtar himself, the turquoise of his kurta looking like it wants nothing more than to brighten the grey-blue sea outside. At 81, the renowned lyricist-screenwriter is sharper than ever, his enduring body of work sustained through patience, discipline and original thought-old-fashioned qualities in a society that demands answers at the drop of a prompt. On the table in front of Akhtar is a sheaf of papers fastened to a clipboard, the uncapped pen beside it indicating that I have disturbed a writing session. "Please sit," says the veteran wordsmith when he catches me trying to decipher his Urdu scrawl, before confessing, "I am writing something new and I just can't find the perfect word for one of the sentences." I take this as my cue to pick his brain while he works it out.