Gulzar and Akhtar mesmerise one and all

Getting people out of work on a Monday morning to listen to poetry is not a hard task if you are Javed Akhtar or Gulzar. So the turnout at the 10 am session titled Kahani Kisko Kehte Hai? - featuring Bollywood's most wanted poet- lyricists with their younger counterpart, adman Prasoon Joshi, and filmmaker Vishal Bharadwaj - was no big surprise.The session took off with the launch of photographer Rohit Chawla's calendar made especially for the festival and then progressed into an hour of satirical limericks, inspiring poetry and a series of pleasant exchanges between Akhtar and Gulzar, who pretty much took over the session, given that they are excellent public speakers, and both Joshi and Bharadwaj are the shy reticent types.Speaking of how old folk tales and epics from India form the backbone of Indian screenwriting, Akhtar recited the tale of the hare and the tortoise with a contemporary twist. " When the tortoise finally got to the finish line and he saw the hare waiting for him there, he was surprised, but he almost dropped down dead when the hare told him, "Oh, by the way, I am not the same hare who started the race with you, I am his grandson. He died but told me to wait here at the finish line by the time you reached to tell you that you had lost the race." Hearing this, the audience broke into ripples of laughter.Gulzar commented on how a story such as Devdas has acquired the status of an immortal classic and not lost its flavour despite the many adaptations."The way relationships are today, there may come a time when Devdas gets over Paro and moves on to another woman, and not become a broken-hearted alcoholic," the poet chuckled.Speaking for precisely two minutes, Bharadwaj said, "I wanted to be a music composer and the only reason I became a filmmaker was to allow me to have my music compositions played out in the films I make." He disappointed audiences when he did not speak about his adaptations of Shakespearean plays such as Macbeth (Maqbool) and Othello (Omkara) as well as his most recent film, Saath Khoon Maaf, an interpretation of Ruskin Bond's Susanna's Seven Husbands.Instead, he asked Gulzar: "Gulzar ji, if you were to sum up Macbeth in one poetic line, what would it be?" Gulzar answered at once: "Too much ambition and greed turns a good man into a rogue." The gathering of these lyrical men had to be punctuated with couplets and poems, but the real climax, according to Gulzar, was the launch of Akhtar's new book Lava: The Drama of Words. The book of popular poems, nazms and ghazals comes after a gap of seven years from his last published collection.