A few lines about me.....

I was born and educated at Lahore. Since my school days, I had an inclination towards writing and playing cricket. My ambition was to become a cricketer. When I was in class 9th, I was selected editor of my school magazine. In college also writing and cricket went side by side. During those days, my writing pursuits were in extremely immature phase. In graduation, I got scholarship in Urdu. I took admission in Urdu department in Oriental College. This brought an end to my heartfelt desire of becoming a cricketer because I could not play from University of the Punjab as I was a student of Oriental College. Finally, I devoted my whole attention to writing. I was recognized as a talented young poet and was published in literary magazines. This encouraged me to write poetry.

Lahore at that time was the hub of all social and cultural activities. Its vibrant culture not only enriched my experience but also helped me develop my own outlook about life. The influence is discernable in my poetry and especially in most of my plays.

During formative years, form does not possess any meaning because, practically, one is neither conscious of form nor knows the scope of it. It was important for me to express myself and nothing else. Poetry was never a profession for me. It was part of my life.

I can write about the innermost recesses of my personality only in poetry. My personal potential, I think, can best be realised only through this medium. Poetry is my natural expression. I wish people could identify me as a poet. People may stop watching my plays even in my life but my poetry will last longer. The readership is though limited but more captivating. Longevity of poetry is more than that of plays. My plays might be forgotten after decades but not my poetry.

I don’t know if it is possible to understand the urge that compels one to write, especially poetry. What can one say about why one writes it, and why in the form of half-formed sentences, or why one juxtaposes words in strange combinations, and even then it has its own strictness of format, two-lined, three-lined, four-lines and so on. But there is a strange, almost inexplicable satisfaction when the urge to create takes hold of one, and one feels compelled to purge oneself of the thoughts one is possessed with. The stronger the urge, the greater the catharsis. I believe that yes, there may have been, each time, some stimuli that provided the prompt, that became the catalyst, and started trains of thought and brought about the process of creativity, but what comes out, each time, is the sum-total of one’s entire personality to the hour. It is the expression of everything that has gone into one’s mind, the little pin-points of experiences and information and everything else to which one has related and which have become part of one’s psyche. The process in the mind that, in reaction, creates a whole work of art, is what I call the tip of the iceberg. I believe the creative process has not been understood so far, I don’t know if it will ever be. For my part, I believe that one cannot wholly grasp the process of creativity with reference only to stimuli percived through the eye or the ear, or the nostrils, or the tongue or the skin. And that is why I don’t know how my poems come into being.

All artistic creation is like the flow of a stream which carries the big and the small alike. Big ones are the bends which change the course and the speed of the stream which nevertheless remains the same stream it was at its origin. Moreover, one great poet does not follow immediately another great poet, in fact, prepares grounds for the emergence of next great poet. A great poet is capable of seeing beneath the surface. He rises above the moment and finds out universal and eternal realities in a fleeting and momentary experience. If, however, he reduces himself to expressing the surface of an event, he can never be great.

I was fascinated by literary activity since my childhood. When I heard plays on the radio. I used to think that I could write plays too. I began to write and my plays were published in the Punjab University Urdu magazine, Mehvar. In the beginning they were patterned on radio plays, full of sound effects. This verbosity of radio plays is still in evidence in our TV plays. I fancy I’ve grown out of it. In 1974 when I wasn’t getting anywhere much with my efforts to write for the TV, I met Sahira Ansari (now Kazmi), who was fresh from her convent, and looking for someone to write plays for her. I wrote Barzakh and Mom ki Gurya for the TV. For several years afterwards, till October 1979, to be precise, I remained a twelfth man for the TV., called in when their regular ‘in’ writers were not available but things changed with Waaris.