Skip to main content

Azal ki pukaar

Azal ki pukaar

Raat ke akelepan mein
Bayaaz-e-paak kafan odhe
Ye kiski rooh chali aati hai
Aahistaa se paas mere,

Benazeer si aankhein jiski
Ghoorti hai mujhe sargoshi se
Aur poochti hai kuch dilsoz sawal
masoom sile labon se,

Uske saath mein,
Khudh ko aur bhi tanha pata hoon
Ye aaghaaz hai aakhir-e-shab ki
Ya azal ki pukaar,

Shikast-e-saaz ke phailey iss shor mein
Uske ankahi lafzon ke samandar mein,
Khudh ko utarta paata hoon.

Again, to help my readers, I am doing an English "version" and not translation.

Mysterious Night

Shrouded in mystery, in this lonely night
Someone walks up to me,
And sits beside,

With myriad expressions in her eyes
She stares me,
With her lips still unmoved
She asks thousand questions to me,

In her company
I get more saddened,
I wonder if this is the beginning of the last night,
Or the call of the destiny,

The uproar of the silence overwhelmes me,
And, I find myself drowning
in the ocean of her unspoken words.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When nationalism tried to ‘reform’ Indian sadhus

In 1930, a sadhu named Dhoortanand had come to a wealthy household of one Lalaji, promising him to double his wealth by conducting a three-day tapasya (penance, ritual). The next morning, Lalaji had to go to the police station to report on the absconding sadhu and the missing wealth. Apparently, Lalaji was not the only one to have fallen prey to the promise of becoming richer; such a tapasya, according to the police, was conducted in at least twenty-five households. Published under the title Gerua Daaku (Ochre-Robe Robber) under a Kahkaha series (joke-stories), the story and the name itself – Dhoortanand, meaning deceitful – symbolised the extent to which the figure of the sadhu had become the stock of social mocking in the early decades of the twentieth century.   Cutting across layers of time, perhaps there is no other Indian figure that comes close to sadhus in being seen as the bearer of disguise and artiste of deceit. From the times of the Ramayana when Ravana disguised as ...
Post a Comment
Read more

“Cockroaches” at home? Gen Z and the new frontiers of politicization

A disparaging comment , describing the unemployed youth of the country as cockroaches and parasites, made by the chief justice of India (CJI), Surya Kant, created history. It gave rise to a much-needed street-based movement in India. The protest placards, the snappy bytes of the protestors, and the witty slogans will remain inerasable evidences of a temporal shift which the future historians will use to write the history of popular protests and Indian democracy. Image source: here We need to wait to see how this movement will make its journey from movement to being a vehicle of political transformation, but there is no doubt that the government has lost this round to India’s youth. This victory carries wider implications for our political culture and for existing notions of social and moral authority. The dominant political culture of the Modi era is based on cult loyalty, (misplaced) hyper-patriotism, and majoritarianism. Modi has quite successfully tried to fuse political, social, a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The doomed diva

The doomed diva Har ek mod pe bas do hi naam milte hain Maut keh lo – jo muhabbat na kehne paao (There are only two names on each pathways (of life) Call it death, if you can’t call it love) I am sorry for even trying my hands at translating these beautiful verses portraying intense suffering, tragedy and clamour of an individual. Are there any guesses who penned these lines? I am sure very few of us would rightfully identify this poetess-in-oblivion who wrote many such verses and couplets as a personal way of registering, recording and dealing with her grief-stricken short life of forty odd years. She was born on 1st August 1932 in Mumbai to Ali Baksh and Iqbal Begum (renamed from Prabhawati Devi). Her father was an actor in Parsi theatre and also dabbled in Urdu poetry and occasionally gave music direction in Hindi movies. This girl, Mahjabeen Bano, was the youngest of her siblings and in the family mired in financial hardships she was literally forced to work in films. Her career st...
10 comments
Read more