Multi node kafka cluster: Producer and Consumer not working - apache-kafka

Question

I have a kafka cluster consisting of two machines. This is my server.properties:
broker.id=2
listeners=PLAINTEXT://:9092
advertised.listeners=PLAINTEXT://a.b.c.d:9092
num.network.threads=3
num.io.threads=8
socket.send.buffer.bytes=102400
socket.receive.buffer.bytes=102400
socket.request.max.bytes=104857600
log.dirs=/tmp/kafka-logs
num.partitions=2
num.recovery.threads.per.data.dir=1
offsets.topic.replication.factor=1
transaction.state.log.replication.factor=1
transaction.state.log.min.isr=1
log.retention.hours=168
log.segment.bytes=1073741824
log.retention.check.interval.ms=300000
zookeeper.connect=a.b.c.d:2181,a.b.c.e:2181
zookeeper.connection.timeout.ms=6000
group.initial.rebalance.delay.ms=0
And this is my zookeeper.properties:
dataDir=/tmp/zookeeper
clientPort=2181
maxClientCnxns=0
tickTime=2000
server.1=a.b.c.d:2888:3888
server.2=a.b.c.e:2888:3888
initLimit=20
syncLimit=10
a.b.c.d = The IPs these machines have, e.g. 192.168.....
I start the zookeeper server on both machines using:
bin/zookeeper-server-start config/zookeeper.properties
I then start kafka servers on both the nodes. After this, I am able to create a new topic and get its details using --describe. However I am unable to read from consumer or write to producer. I run these by:
bin/kafka-console-consumer --bootstrap-server a.b.c.d:9092,a.b.c.e:9092 --topic randomTopic --from beginning
bin/kafka-console-producer --broker-list a.b.c.d:9092,a.b.c.e:9092 --topic randomTopic
When I run the producer, the prompt(>) appears and I can write into it. However, kafka cannot read anything from the consumer and the screen remains black.
How do I make the consumer read the data in the topics or make producer able to write the data in the topics?