કૈલાસ પંડિત

Kailas Pandit was born in Jabalpur, far outside Gujarat, and began writing verse at twelve — but it was Mumbai, where he spent his entire working life as an employee at the Gabriel India factory, that made him a poet. Ghazals written on factory time and finished at night earned him a place among the most sung Gujarati poets of his generation, his lines carried into households far beyond literary circles by playback singers like Manhar Udhas and Pankaj Udhas. His published collections — Dwida, Sangath, and Umalkho — hold the more formal side of his output, but he was equally at home in the lighter geet, and his lullaby “Dikro Maro” became one of Gujarat’s best-loved cradle songs. He died in Pune in 1994 at just fifty-two, before much of his wider recognition had fully arrived, leaving behind a body of work prized for finding aching depth inside deceptively simple, almost conversational Gujarati.