Poet Aamir Aziz says that he would, perhaps, have been the last person in the world to have got to know about rock icon Roger Waters reading out lines from his poem, Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega, at a London protest.
The poet-lyricist-balladeer, who was in Patna to perform at Kanhaiya Kumar’s rally on Thursday, was sent the video link late on Wednesday night by a friend, but couldn’t access it because of a bad Internet connection. “I assumed it was one of those mashup videos in which my poem must have been superimposed on one of his [Waters’] performances,” he told The Hindu on a phone call from Delhi on Friday morning.
He finally got to see the clip after the rally at around five on Thursday evening, by which time it had gone viral and his phone was jammed with thousands of messages from friends and fans. Aziz, who has written popular protest songs and poems of dissent such as Achche Din Blues, The Ballad of Pehlu Khan, Jamia Ki Ladkiyaan and Main Inkaar Karta Hoon, wrote this nazm “in the name of Kashmir, AMU, Jamia, UP, JNU, Delhi and all those places where atrocities are committed by cowards in the cover of darkness”. Having had no contact with Vijay Prashad or Tariq Ali, mentioned by Waters as his source for the translated poem, Aziz was pleasantly surprised at it having made its way to the Pink Floyd founder.
Meanwhile, Vijay Prashad tweeted about carrying the poem in his newsletter. “Roger Waters of Pink Floyd read it, loved it, and recited it at the rally for [the release of] Julian Assange [Wikileaks founder] in London. He slammed the Modi regime”, tweeted Prashad.
“Kitni raatein guzaari hain Pink Floyd sunte (I have spent many nights listening to Pink Floyd),” said Aziz on idolizing the band for a long time. Unable to process the praise — “This kid’s got a future” — lavished on him by the “rock phenomenon”, as he refers to Waters, Aziz said: “Mujhe pata nahin kya bolna chahiye (I have no idea what to say)… Just that my poetry, my words have reached out to him.”