Whether he is conjuring up exquisite lyrics, authoring delightful screenplays or directing profoundly moving celluloid odes, Gulzar, peerless poet, sensitive writer and outstanding filmmaker, is a consummate master of his craft. What makes him truly special is that he has managed to move with the times without straying from his poetic moorings.

Despite being an integral part of the big, bad Bollywood, Gulzar soars above its messy mediocrity. His immense popularity, which hasn’t come at the cost of pandering to the lowest common denominator, rests primarily on the seventeen feature films that he has directed and the countless lyrics that he has penned in a career spanning over four eventful decades.

Echoes & Eloquences is as much a critical appraisal of his cinematic output as it is a biography. It is an attempt to place his films and the fictional worlds they project in the context of his life and times. More than anything else, it pays homage to one of Hindi cinema’s last surviving links with its golden era.  

About the Author
A senior editor with The Indian express, Saibal Chatterjee is a film and media critic based in New Delhi who has worked on the staff of leading Indian publications like The Telegraph, The Times of India and the website of The Hindustan Times. In a career spanning over two decades, he has covered entertainment-related events and film festivals in different parts of the world and tracked Indian and international cinema with a critical eye. In 2003, he won the President’s Gold Medal for Best Film Critic. He served as a key member of the editorial board of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema.