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Javed ends the unspoken cold war when on a talk show he wished he had written Gulzar saab’s Beedi jalay le in Omkara Gulzar They are the two most revered lyricists of Hindi cinema. And yet Gulzar and Javed Akhtar have never seen eye to eye. It all began when Javed Akhtar’s illustrious father-in-law, the late Kaifi Azmi criticised Gulzar’s style of poetry-writing. Javed followed it by saying that he found Gulzar saab’s metre-rendering faulty and therefore not poetic enough. But after a lengthy period of stony silence between the two, Javed ended the unspoken cold war when on a talk show he generously wished he had written Gulzar saab’s Beedi jalay le in Omkara. Says Javed saab, “When I praised Beedi, I wasn’t trying to do the correct thing or make amends. I genuinely love that song. At the same time I still feel some basic rules of poetry have to be followed while writing poetry. Otherwise why not just call it prose?” Javed Akhtar Gulzar saab, currently in Chennai collaborating with A R Rahman for Subhash Ghai’s new film, is pleased. “Did Javed really say that? It was very generous of him. I often feel that way about many of his songs. You know just two months before Hindi litterateur Kamleshwar died, he wrote me a letter praising the ‘Meerut-ki-zubaan’ in the Beedi song. He said he heard the song with his grand-daughter and they both enjoyed it.” Gulzar saab feels film lyricists are a disadvantaged breed. “We have always had to work under a great creative disadvantage. The tune is always given to us first from the advent of talkie cinema. We had to write in the lyrics. Even today the songs are successful for their tunes, not lyrics. Only two lyricists made the songs into successes — Sahir Ludhianvi and Pradeep. There’s no third name.”