Sixty-two years ago, on 4 October 1964, a 19-year-old Javed Akhtar stepped off at Bombay Central Station with 27 naye paise, no fixed address and no clear path into the film industry. Shabana Azmi marked the anniversary on 4 October 2026 with a rare throwback photograph and a plain account of what that arrival demanded.
She recalled that he slept on footpaths, at railway stations and in the compounds of many studios. At the lowest point, he went three days without food. The only clothes he owned, she wrote, were the shreds on his body. On the edge of despair, she said, he told himself he was not born just to die and that “yeh din badlenge” — these days will change.
The arc from footpath to first page
The date matters because it frames everything that followed. Akhtar would go on to form Salim-Javed with Salim Khan, the screenwriting partnership most closely associated with the angry, restless leading man of 1970s Hindi cinema. The films credited to that partnership include:
- Zanjeer
- Deewaar
- Sholay
- Don
After the partnership, Akhtar established a separate reputation as a lyricist and poet, which is why the anniversary reads as an origin story for two careers, not one.
Why the social post works
Most anniversary posts summarise success. Azmi’s is more useful because it keeps the ledger honest: no job, no bed, no meals. She pairs the hunger with the line he used to keep going, then adds a direct challenge: “If he can do it so can you. Never give up.”
For readers who know Akhtar mainly through awards, the detail is a small correction. The writer behind some of Hindi cinema’s most quoted lines did not arrive with connections. He arrived with almost nothing except a dream, to use Azmi’s framing.
What to carry from this
- Keep the concrete detail—the date, the station, the exact amount—rather than saying only “times were hard.”
- Present the struggle and the change together, so the achievement is measured honestly.
- Don’t romanticise the hardship; notice the persistence that followed it.
That is the value of this kind of post for the record: it turns a famous name back into a visible, vulnerable person, and lets the career answer the question of whether the gamble was worth it.
Source: Mid-day
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