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It was a magical evening as a bevy of celebrities came together to mark the beginning of the centenary celebrations of legendary poet and activist Kaifi Azmi. 

Present on the occasion were family members Shabana Azmi, Baba Azmi, Tanvi Azmi, Javed Akhtar and Farhan Akhtar along with eminent personalities like Vidya Balan, Siddharth Roy Kapur, Poonam Dhillon, Madhu Chopra, Divya Dutta, Kanwaljit Singh, Neena Gupta, Tannishtha Chatterji and Aditi Rao Hydari.

A yearlong celebration with mushairas, plays, seminars, pen festival, and three book releases has been planned in India and abroad in honour of poet and activist, Kaifi Azmi starting from the 13th of January 2019 at NCPA, Mumbai with a special event called 'Raag Shayari'. 

‘Raag Shayari’ will be a special occasion of music and Kaifi Sahab’s poetry conceived by Javed Akhtar and starring Ustad Zakir Hussain, Shankar Mahadevan, Javed Akhtar, and Shabana Azmi and directed by Feroz Abbas Khan with Production Design by Anuradha Parikh. 'Raag Shayari' will be performed on the 13th at the NCPA and 14th at St. Andrews Auditorium.

Kaifi Azmi who is recognized as one of the finest poets of our times has borne witness to an entire era of social changes. His first ghazal was 'Itna toh zindagi mein kisi ki khalal pade' that got him instant recognition. As a lyricist his most popular songs are from 'Kaagaz Ke Phool', 'Haqeeqat', 'Arth' and 'Heer Ranjha'. 'Heer Ranjha' and his other film songs were written entirely in verse. Kaifi Azmi has also received the greatest number of literary and poetry awards for his works.

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” William Shakespeare said in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Waris Shah, the author of the eighteenth-century epic poem Heer Raanjha, would heartily agree.

The undivided Punjab produced tragic romances, including Sohni-Mahiwal, Mirza-Sahiban and Heer-Raanjha. Waris Shah, a Sufi mystic, was said to have been inspired by a true story, some say from his own life. Why would a mystic write an intense love story that he hadn’t experienced himself? The Sufi strain of Islam, like the Bhakti strain in Hinduism, strongly believes that even an ordinary human being can reach god through the path of love and devotion. This belief earned the mystics the ire of the authorities. The act of speaking to power was sublimated through passionate romances such as Heer Raanjha, in which the lovers are separated by Heer’s family and suffer deeply before dying for their love. Along the way, they never stop defying family members, the larger community and religious heads.

It takes a certain sensibility to depict such a passionate love story on the screen, and Chetan Anand, the director of Neecha Nagar (1946) and Haqeeqat (1964), proved to be the right fit. With Heer Raanjha (1970), the boy from Lahore came home.

While his younger brother Dev Anand presented in his movie Prem Pujari (1970)a sanitised Punjabi village with beautifully coiffured damsels wearing designer clothes and singing in mustard fields (surely inspiring Yash Chopra down the line), Chetan Anand’s Heer Raanjha was set in a rugged landscape and revolves around hearty village folk. SD Burman’s soundtrack for Prem Pujari was a hit but the movie itself flopped. Heer Raanjha, on the other hand, did surprisingly well. It had no fancy camerawork, no European locations and Swiss milkmaids chasing the hero down cobbled streets. The movie had popular music by M