ये ग़ाफ़िल जवानी

The Hindi Film Geet Kosh lists this as a dance song in Pratima (1945), sung by Naseem Akhtar, written by Narendra Sharma and composed by Arun Kumar. Hindigeetmala carries the title with no singer at all and MySwar files it under 'Various artists', so the credit survives only in HFGK. The documented opening plays on a pair of rhyming epithets for youth — heedless and murderous — and on the singer's own admission that her youth is not in her control.

No audio of the number has surfaced, so its tempo and orchestration cannot be described. Two things are documented and worth recording: HFGK marks it a dance song, which in a 1945 Bombay production implies a rhythm-led setting built for picturisation rather than for the gramophone; and the voice is Naseem Akhtar's, a Lahore Radio-trained singer then in the busiest stretch of her Bombay career.

Only the opening of Sharma's text is documented. What it signals is register: 'ghafil' is a word that arrives in Hindi song from the Persian-Urdu ethical tradition, where it names the sleeper who does not know he is asleep — the human being unaware of time, of mortality, of consequence. Sharma pairs it with a second, rhyming epithet and then turns the whole thing into a disclaimer: the youth being described is not something its owner governs. Placed in a dance number, that is less a sermon than a piece of wit. Beyond the opening, nothing about the poem can be stated.

Pratima was Bombay Talkies' release of 14 December 1945 — P. Jairaj's first film as director, Dilip Kumar's second as an actor, Swaran Lata's follow-up to the previous year's Rattan, and the screen debut of Mukri. Its whole soundtrack was written by Narendra Sharma and composed by Arun Kumar Mukherjee. This is the film's one documented dance number and its only credit for Naseem Akhtar, who does not otherwise appear in the Pratima paperwork. Because no plot record survives, who dances it on screen is unknown; the film's cast includes both Cuckoo and Mumtaz Ali.

Nothing of this song is in circulation: no reissue, no film print, no online audio. Its interest is as a small case study in how film-music records decay — hindigeetmala and MySwar both carry the title but have lost the singer, and only the Geet Kosh still knows that Naseem Akhtar sang it and that it was staged as a dance.