'But I didn't like the lines 'Jawanon bhar lo jholiyan, khushi se bolo boliyan...I removed it from my 'Upkar' song. Instead we had 'Meri desh ki dharti sona ugley ugle heere-moti'. Both Kalyanji and Gulshan were hesitant. They said the 'mukhda' of a song couldn't be of one line. But I was adamant.

'An hour later Gulshan, who was sitting in the next room jumped and said, 'This is great'. Every filmmaker while writing a screenplay comes to a landmark point in the plot where he thinks a scene can be narrated musically. That situation is given to the lyricist and explained. That was how 'Mere desh ki dharti' happened.

'I always had the lyrics first, then the tunes. Gulshan had written another song 'Har khushi hai wahan' in 'Upkar'. He couldn't write the whole song because he had to take my brother to college in Ajmer. Gulshan himself told the media that the second stanza of 'Har khushi hai wahan' was written by Aziz Kaifi and Manoj Kumar.'

Manoj Kumar says his friend did a wonderful job while penning lyrics for Prakash Mehra's hit Amitabh starrer 'Zanjeer'.

'Gulshan worked very well with Prakash Mehra in songs like 'Yaari hai imaan mera'. Before he became well-known he wrote songs under a pseudonym. He was also a very good comedian. He always made everyone laugh with his mimicry.

'We were from the same village near Lahore (now in Pakistan). My chief assistant Sikandar was Gulshan's cousin. So we bonded much beyond cinema. Filmmaker Kewal Sharma, cricket player Manmohan Sood, Gushan and I... we were good friends. Gulshan has only gone away physically. He was a wonderful man. He was a friend to everyone, never gossiped. God bless his soul. All my love to his wife,' Manoj Kumar concluded.