O ! MY FOOLISH
HEART
India’s greatest Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah
Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) asks in one of his ghazals :
DiI-e-nadan tujhe hua kya hai
akhir is dard ki dava kya hai
A simple English translation of this
verse is as follows:
“O! my foolish heart , what has happened to you? You are crying for something impossible. It
is well known that whatever a lover may do, the pain of love finds no relief.
So, what
should the heart do ? Naturally, it
should stop crying and continue to bear the pain . The heart is the centre of
love’s pleasant and unpleasant emotions. Union between the lover and the
beloved, which happens rarely, creates gratifying feelings. In the entire love poetry of the
world, love remains ungratified. A lover seeks a perfect alliance with
his lady love, but fails to get it. This
disappointment , however painful it may be, is not to the disadvantage of the
lover, because it tremendously activates his mind and imagination and turns him
into a poet of heart-touching verses.
Ghalib
became a great poet because of his unrequited love. In another heart-touching
verse: he admits:
Ye na thi
hamari qismat ke visal-e-yar hota
Agar aur jite rahte
yahi intizar
hota
(Me and my lover were not destined to be united. Long wait yielded no result. Any further waiting, too, would have remained fruitless).
Gratified
love is comic. It does not touch those tragic heights which . ungratified love
does. That is why all great and sublime poetry is the result unrequited love.
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19th March 2022 G.R.Kanwal
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