Javed Akhtar: VERSE for the BETTER

Pune, July 20: When script-writer and poet Javed Akhtar says that he has no words to describe the bomb blasts in Mumbai, you know he's been shaken up beyond a point. Which was certainly the case when Akhtar, who was in Lonavla on that fateful day busy writing the script for his next film, got the appalling news. ''I was absolutely shell-shocked, like every Mumbaite would have been,'' he says with palpable feeling. ''For the first time I felt there were no words in my vocabulary to describe the action, as adjectives like warped or perverse, all seemed wholly inadequate,'' states Akhtar.

And then it came to him. Once the news and the enormity of it all had sunk in, it took Akhtar all of half-an-hour to pen down a poem titled Atankvad (Terrorism) in Hindi and then drive down to Pune to record it at a radio station, so that it could be read out in his own voice all over the country.

So while the poem starts with the blast and the havoc it wrecked on the life of Mumbaites, it almost immediately goes on to describe the spirit of the city that emerged triumphant and indefatigable even in the face of this huge crisis. Akhtar talks of a city that held the hand extended to it by the rest of the country to immediately lift itself up after the blasts, a city bent on defeating the darkness of terrorism through the sheer brilliance of unity and progress and a city that can never be stopped in its tracks by the the anti-social elements.

It's like Akhtar says, almost like an epilogue to the poem he's written, ''I don't guarantee that I write good poetry, but I do write poetry that I feel from the heart.''