Back to poetry

That fascination,over the years,simmered into adoration. Love. Devotion. Ibaadat. Such are the ways of the heart.

By the evening,Begum Akthar left him with an “unreal feeling”,Haldea had an MBA from BITS Pilani and was settling into his first job with a hand tools company in Delhi,a city he was to make his home. “It was good in Delhi. Unlike Jaipur,it was culturally vibrant.

There were music and ghazal events all the time,” he says.

Four decades later,Haldea (62),has made a name as an entrepreneur and capital markets expert. In 1989,he founded Prime Database,India’s premier database on the primary capital market. He was consultant to the World Bank and an advisor to SEBI for 16 years. He is the government nominee on the governing council of ICAI and a member of the board of governors of Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs,SEBI primary market advisory committee,NSE and various chambers.

But all along,his passion for poetry remained lit. For it wasn’t a hobby,a distraction from the daily wrestle with statistics and policies; it was embedded in his breath and heartbeat,a muse playing gently by his side.

Outside Haldea’s world though,over the years,Urdu poetry was fading away into mushairas that few attended and poor ink-and-error-splattered books that even fewer read.

Partly,this was because of the political marginalisation of the language.

“Art can’t survive without patronage,” Haldea says. Partly because Bollywood,which helped revive Urdu poetry in India after the Partition and took it to the masses,was losing verse to noise. Lyricists,commercialised into finding lazy placeholders for cadence,were abusing the most intriguing and evocative metaphors — sanam,a metaphor invested with meaning by thousands of years of history,for instance — into clichés. Haldea thought something needed to be done. What? The thought occupied Haldea — at work; during evening walks on a little strip of sun-bleached green,speckled with sparse flower bushes,as if an afterthought,outside his house; and when he gazed,with his soft,sad eyes of a poet,at a busted sepia-coloured radio that belonged to his father and now sits in his plush living room beneath an abstract painting hung slack.

Then,about four years ago,Haldea happened to be at a corporate event where the daughter of Pakistani singer Reshma was singing. “After every other sher,I was like ‘wah,wah’. ‘mukarar’. I noticed this lady in the audience glancing at me. I thought I was disturbing her and shut up. During a break,she came over and we had a chat.”

She was Shikha Biswas,the daughter of music composer Anil Biswas. She invited Haldea to join her organisation,Sangeet Smriti,which worked to “reacquaint” people with the music and poetry from a more melodious era of Bollywood.

In 2008,Sangeet Smriti brought Mubarak Begum,she of the melancholy Kabhi tanhaiyun main hamari yaad aaye gi fame,to Delhi. “She was old,75 years of age,living in a slum in Mumbai with her daughter who has Parkinson’s.

She is a proud woman and thought we were doing charity for her. It took six months to convince her,” he says.

That evening in Delhi,Mubarak Begum left many a heart in tears. “It was the most emotional event I have ever been at. She got many offers to sing at different places after that event. She is better off now,” Haldea says.

Sangeet Smriti was doing “admirable work” but Haldea felt its focus on songs was rather narrow. He loved verse and of this love was born,a year ago to the month in a Delhi coffee shop,Ibaadat Foundation.

There could not have been a better name for an organisation devoted to deifying the art of verse and the craft of its practitioners. Ibaadat — the word,in its narrowest sense,translates as worship — is losing oneself in devotion. In love.

But it takes more than love and noble intentions to persuade a people trapped in the tyranny of routine life to discover,appreciate and soak up the mystery and beauty of art.

So Ibaadat drew up a plan: to begin with,they would organise events on poets who also wrote for movies. The idea was to introduce people to art through the artists,for,as Yeats said,“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

And it was a blast of an idea,if the response to the first event — Rooh-e- Majrooh,a paean to the genius of Majrooh Sultanpuri which serenaded audiences in Delhi on November 12,2011 and in Mumbai on March 16 — is any measure.

“This is undoubtedly the most touching,most beautifully presented mehfil I have ever attended. It brought Majrooh bhai alive. I have attended over 1,200 shows but cannot remember even one close enough to this one,” the legendary Ameen Sayani wrote in appreciation.

In January this year,Ibaadat followed it up with ‘Neeraj — Ek Sham’ to celebrate a poet who we are indebted to for melodies such as Khilte hain gul yahaan,khil ke bikharne ko and poems such as Kaarvan guzar gaya,gubaar dekhte rahe. Neeraj,an ailing legend of 88,came to recite some of his poems.

On Friday,Prithvi and his team — Ibaadat is run by seven trustees,“all crazy and passionate about poetry” — hosted ‘Lo aa gayi un ki yaad’,a tribute to Shakeel Badauni,on his 96th birth anniversary.

In the coming months and years,Ibaadat plans to celebrate the masters — Ghalib,Mir,Iqbal,Faiz and Firaq — and,hopefully,bring their verses closer to where they belong: in the realm between mad hope and heartache,myth and metaphor. That’s also the realm of love. And Ibaadat.