Here's how to look and act like a serious poet. Hindi filmi style. By poet, here, of course Hindi movies mean Shaayar, the Urdu word for poet, so that the person in question has to be an Urdu poet, strictly speaking, which is just an excuse to employ all those now-jobless and patronless bullshit artists from places like Allahabad to write a bunch of crap in a language that no one would ever be using on the street, if they were in Bombay or Delhi, that is. Who am I talking about? People with names like (something) Muradabadi, Gulzar, Akhtar etc. Those rejects/leftovers from the 70s who still think that Urdu words in ``reality oriented'' Hindi movies are... well, for real.

Take, for example, a really really serious poet from the movie Namak Haraam (I said on this page, that this movie is a classic, not because of Rajesh Khanna's death - oops did I ruin the movie for anyone? - but because of the massive - literally - hamming performance by Om Shiv Puri, and because of this poet we are going to talk about). Raza Muraad. Now I have some respect for the dude because of that great voice of his. But I think he was *wasted* in this movie. They used his voice to deliver the most deadpan meaningless lines of ``poetry'' ever. Raza Muraad plays an Urdu poet suffering from PASS (Perpetual Alcoholism and Shaayiri Syndrome). As Kesariya Vilaayiti, Gulshan Grover's character in Ram Lakhan says whenever he makes plans to get rid of someone, ``pass kar dete hain ise''. Thanks to Muraad's role in this movie, we get to see some of the worst lines of pseudopoetry ever filmed. The PASS poet always has to die of some ridiculously incurable disease (as a great dialogue starts over and over again, ``Daroo peene se liver kharaab ho jaata hai...'')
I don't remember the exact lines from the movie, but let me demonstrate what I'm talking about. Imagine a drunk Raza Muraad walking back home from the (pub?), and coming across an obstacle. Immediately, he looks into empty space and utters words of wisdom that might or might not consist (but not exclusively) of a random combination of the following bunch of words, in his wonderfully low-frequency (but right now, deadpan) voice:
``Woh kehte hain / ki shaam ke waqt / ka haseen / maidaan-e-jung / ey doston / ki taqdeer / ka likha / musaafir / quaatil sharaab / husn ke parde / mehfil mein rang / zindagi aur maut / ke marna hi hai / maut ko choom liya...''
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying other people didn't play roles of poets suffering PASS in other movies. I'm just saying this is an outstanding example, because after all, when Raza Muraad finally has to leave this earth (with maybe some words like ``Ke chod chale duniya doston / mushqil / din se raat ka intezaar / ilaaque mein har subah ki raah / kaaton mein bhi so liya...''), Kaka Cola (our friend Rajesh Khanna, who will die later on in this movie - oops did I ruin anything?) sings ``Main Shaayar Badnaam'', which I have to admit is a good Kishore Kumar song, although not that great a song, since its just a lot of phrases ending in -aam, anyway, with a hooo, Main Chala appended to some of these phrases. And that, of course, is common practice if you want to write songs that rhyme, and we will definitely talk about rhyming some other time. Anyways, Kakaji sings this song, and Raza Muraad bids goodbye to him (``PASS ho gaya saala'', Kesariya might have said) - at which point we might comment, saala aisa Kaka gaana gaayega to marega nahin to aur kya karega!

Some other examples of PASS: