One of the leading poets of Urdu, a writer of offbeat film lyrics and dialogue, a prominent writer of fiction and the director of some memorable movies, Gulzar always treads off the beaten tracks.

He is now turning his classics, on small and large screens, into novelettes.

The one published earlier this month in Pakistan is the script of his unforgettable TV serial, which reads like a piece of fiction.

It is the life history of Gulzar’s favourite and all-time great poet, Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. The ghazals were set to tune by singer cum composer Jagjit Singh.

The videos of the TV serial and the audio CDs of the ghazals have been all time high. As everyone knows, the versatile actor Naseeruddin Shah lent authenticity to the role of Mirza Ghalib.

In a recent interview with an Indian daily, Shah said that even though he came from an Urdu-speaking family, his education at a high brow Christian missionary school narrowed his views on the language.

It was only when he started to play Ghalib under the unfailing guidance of Gulzar that he began to appreciate the nuances and subtleties of the language. Since then, he has read and presented two great writers, Ismat Chughtai and Saadat Hasan Manto.

Gulzar’s Ghalib was published in Urdu and Hindi by Rupa Publications in India and earlier this month by the leading publisher of Urdu books in Pakistan, Maktaye Danial, Karachi (Phone 35681457) had earlier published three collections of Gulzar’s poems.

Danial has to its credit publications of such leading figures as Faiz, Sibte Hasan, Quratulain Hyder, Kaifi Azmi, Mushtaq Yusufi and Javed Akhtar, to name a few progressive poets and writers.