If Urdu is a gift to the world, Gulzar is a gift to Urdu.
He writes like a dream, which is so beautiful you never want to wake up. The songs that he has written and the poems he has published, make us wonder how someone can have such beautiful thoughts running in their head and how in the world do they find the perfect words to describe them?
But, but. There’s more to his personality than just writing. He loves playing tennis, the sport that keeps him busy, active and in his own words, childlike.
Someone recently shared a picture of an 84-year-old Gulzar holding tennis trophies he won in 2016 and 2018.
Now that’s something we never associated him with, right?
In an interview given to The Times of India back in 2014, Gulzar had said, “All my friends are in tennis. We play every day from 6 AM to 8 AM. It’s important for me to do some gupshup with them and we talk about everything under the sun in the morning. That opens up all my windows. Playing tennis, I learn every day on how to take a defeat. We get angry and cheat and that keeps the boy inside me alive.”
However, writing is his first love and as all poets, he too, turns everything he is fond of into poetry.
Here is a poem titled Wimbledon that he wrote a long time back for the love of tennis, and just like all of his works, it’s absolutely delightful.
I would have tried to describe how perfect this is, but I can’t find the right words. I am not Gulzar.