So be it the idea of life that takes its own course in Apni marzi se kahan apne safar ke hum hai (the title song of TV serial Sailaab) or buying our loyalties forever by asking us to fall in love and figure the meaning of life with Hosh walon ko khabar kya (Sarfarosh), both in Jagjit Singh’s voice, or a coded desire in Tu iss tarah se meri zindagi mein shamil ho, the ideas were plenty, the words measured yet never adapting to survive. Fazli’s oeuvre found influences in a variety of writers including Kabir, Meera, the pads of Surdas, poetry of Ghalib and Mir and later of Kaifi Azmi and Sardar Jaffrey, the Marxist ideology and writings of T S Eliot and Anton Chekhov. Fazli was 78 and is survived by wife Maalti Joshi and daughter Tehreer.īorn in Delhi in 1938 into a Kashmiri family where poetry resonated at home daily - his father was an Urdu poet - and brought up in Gwalior, Fazli decided to stay on in India though his parents moved to Pakistan in the 1960s. It also became a stark reminder of the fact that with his passing, the world of ghazal and Urdu poetry has lost more lifeblood than it can afford to, and “the last of the real Urdu heavyweights”. His passing on Monday, February 8, on his close friend Jagjit Singh’s birth anniversary, due to a cardiac arrest at his Mumbai residence, put his own poetry into perspective, telling us of the fickleness of life.

The raag was Bihag, and the nation listened, rocking gently in its languor, one of Muqtida Hasan Nida Fazli’s most famous works. This was reality of existence and its crisis in verse, without the beautiful wrapping paper,” Singh recalls.Īlso read: Industry greats remember late Nida Fazli “The poet seemed to have poured far too much heart and reality into it.

When playback singers Asha Bhosle and Bhupinder Singh sat down in a Mumbai studio to rehearse this piece of poetry, set to tune by composer Khayyam for the film Ahista Ahista (1981), the observation and foreboding in it moved them in a way the two hadn’t anticipated.