Nida Fazli

Muqtida Hasan 'Nida' Fazli was born in Delhi and raised in Gwalior, the son of a poet. The wound that shaped his work came in 1965, when his family migrated to Pakistan after the war and he chose to stay behind in India — a separation from his own parents that shadows much of what he wrote. He moved to Mumbai for work, wrote for magazines, and then into films.

As a lyricist he gave Hindi cinema enduring standards — 'Hosh waalon ko khabar kya' from Sarfarosh among them — and his 1994 album with Jagjit Singh, Insight, is treasured. But his deeper achievement was to break the ghazal out of its heavily Persianised diction toward a stripped, image-led simplicity drawn from the Hindi doha and geet, the lineage of Kabir and Surdas. He wrote across Urdu, Hindi and Gujarati, and some of his verse entered Maharashtra's schoolbooks.

His subject was the sacred hidden in the ordinary — a crying child, a mother, a far mosque made unnecessary by an act of kindness. He is the humanist of this shelf: the poet who keeps insisting that compassion, not ritual, is where the holy actually lives.