In a career spanning 45 years and 4,000 songs lyricist Anand Bakshi left little unsaid in the name of love. Bakshi died of a prolonged illness in Mumbai on March 30. He was 72.

Born in 1930 in undivided India's Rawalpindi, Bakshi served in the army for three years before he landed in Bombay with aspirations of becoming a writer. He penned a few songs but had to wait till 1963 for his first break when actor-director Bhagwan paid him the princely sum of Rs 150 for four songs in the film Bhala Aadmi. But it was only after Raj Kapoor signed him for his film Mehndi Lagi Mere Hath that Bakshi's name became known in the music scene.

The lyricist used poetry to give a fresh perspective to songs and worked with the best music directors, including R.D. Burman, Laxmikant-Pyarelal and Kalyanji-Anandji. Though competition was unrelenting-his peers included Kaifi Azmi, Hasrat Jaipuri and Sahir Ludhianvi-Bakshi rose to fame with lyrics for films like Milan, Aradhana, Shaan and recent hits like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Mohabbatein. He had even sung with Lata Mangeshkar for the film Mom Ki Gudiya. The love song now changes to a dirge.

-Himanshi Dhawan

FRANCIS NEWTON SOUZA
1924-2002

Francis Newton Souza's death at age 78 in a Mumbai clinic on March 28 was uncharacteristically calm. Nearly five decades after Stephen Spender published his brilliant autobiographical essay "Nirvana of a Maggot" in Encounter in 1955, this ever volatile 'devil in flesh' of Indian modernism was at last reconciled to his ultimate release and redemption.

A tempestuous life -so fully loved and lived-had come a full circle. It was from Mumbai that he first set out to conquer the world. Sin, sex and salvation were concurrent motifs in the life of this Goan Catholic painter who was easily the single real international success of contemporary Indian art. Uniquely articulate, he augmented his disturbing and powerful canvases with his sharp, stylish and provocative prose. Through the mid-1950s to 1967 he was seen and ranked along with the likes of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. However, after the 1970s Souza was a lost and lonely soul in the anarchy of the Manhattan art market. In fact, a couple of years ago, an NRI writer had called him "one of New York's most well-kept secrets"!

Hopefully, posterity will do better by this passionate imagist whose persona combined in it elements of Van Gogh and Voltaire on the one hand and Mephistopheles and Dracula on the other.

-S. Kalidas

TIKKA KHAN
1915-2002

In Rawalpindi he was a hero. In Dhaka, he was Klaus Barbie. As martial law administrator of East Pakistan in 1971, Lt-General Tikka Khan earned the epithet "Butcher of Bangladesh". His job was to efface the separatist mass movement that was threatening to split his country and, by the end of the year, did.

Tikka, who died in Islamabad on March 28, 2002, launched the lethal Operation Searchlight on another March morning 31 years ago. The "crackdown"-a euphemism for genocide if ever there was one-in effect undid Jinnah's thesis of a single nation united by religion.

The following year, in 1972, Tikka became army chief. A favourite of the Bhuttos, he joined the father's (Zulfiqar's) Pakistan People's Party on retirement. The daughter, Benazir, appointed him governor of Punjab in 1988. Even Tikka's departure from the army chief's job in 1976 was not without controversy. Bhutto superseded five generals to make relatively junior Zia-Ul-Haq Tikka's successor. As they may have said, after Tikka came the masala.

-Ashok Malik