Miss ya Ghalib

Today is Mirza Ghalib’s 220th birthday. I wasn’t keeping track and I certainly will now try to make up for that shameful deficit on my part by wishing him on Facebook.
In the meantime, let me tell you a bit about ol’ MG.

As per upper class Muslim tradition (of his time, I would like to believe) he got married in the arranged fashion at the age of 13. By the age of 30, he had seven children. None of them survived beyond infancy though. So by 30, about the time American kids are leaving high school, Indian kids are changing the diapers of their second child and Russian kids are building their third remote satellite linked self guided missile to blow up those American kids - Ghalib had sired and lost 7 children of his own, understood pain from a proximity and an intimate intensity that most people only pretend to understand when they put up posts on social media about starving kids or burning dogs and penned some of his best poetry (he started composing poems from the time he was 11 years of age).

We have stopped building men like Ghalib for a long time (we have Pritam and Anu Malik these days). That I know. I wonder why though. I wonder why we celebrate regress and stunted reach as the token of our times. I wonder why we pitch everything at the lowest common denominator and judge its success by how many likes or how much funding it gets. Maybe I am of the wondering minority. But I am surely not alone. That too I know.

Coming back to the dude, Mirza mia also had the gift of letter writing (it is something people do with pens on paper). Not only Urdu poetry but also Urdu prose owes Ghalib deeply. Before him, Urdu letter writing was a masturbatory exercise of ornamental, flowery and self serving Urdu - throwing a handful of the elite into the throes of a sextet orgasm. Ghalib de-pedestialised Urdu by writing easy, popular Urdu letters that brought joy, tears and smiles to the masses. Much like Shakespeare, he held the common man’s emotions in higher regard and wanted to bring those emotions to a meaningful catharsis.

So why am I writing all this today? 220 years after the man was born? How does a dude from the 18th century hold any meaning in the 21st? At a time when things older than 5 minutes run the risk of being rendered irrelevant or redundant. What is it in and about Ghalib that we can learn from? Is there anything at all? Let’s see -

Ghalib lived at a time when pain, suffering and volatility were not only rampant but pretty much the order of the day. He has seen entire cities, mohallas and bazaars being razed to the ground, people butchered and lives snuffed out with excessive and debilitating alacrity. The violence and the volatile, Quixotic spirit of his times were some of his more defining and enduring inspirations when it came to chronicling his zeitgeist. What kind of times do we live in now? What are our politicians, our corporations and our citizens engaged in principally? We gave birth to a smart acronym - VUCA. It stands for (and no surprises) - VOLATILITY, UNCERTAINTY, COMPLEX, AMBIGUITY. VUCA is not a marginalised term used to describe the exceptions of our times. It is a popular, fucking highly used and searched term that describes almost everything about life today. Don’t we think Ghalib’s MO can help us here? Don’t we believe understanding his writing (the best way to know a man when he is dead. When he is alive, it is his shoes, friends and whiskey that give clues about him) can teach us something? I suppose so. But the problem is - nobody reads these days. An entire generation, an army of pussified illiterates with highly tooled and supremely gadgeted intentions are roaming the face of the earth with little better zeal than to post pictures of their puckered faces and getting into arguments with strangers on subjects they have no fucking clue about. That is largely us.

My usual disclaimer - this is not a jaundiced piece of self defeating writing. I don’t believe in jaundice and I sure AF don’t believe in self defeat. Or any defeat for that matter. As long as we live, we must strive for grace, glory, compassion and intelligence. And a sentient form of intelligence at that too. Which is why this piece. What we are doing with ourselves is not making much sense.

Ghalib had written:

Sau kos se ba-zaban-e-qalam baatein kiya karo aur hijr mein visaal ke maze liya karo

Loosely (and badly) put, it means:
Speak with the tongue of the pen from a hundred miles and revel in the joy of meeting even when you are separated

Today we are crammed into each other’s lives like bacteria in a petri dish thanks to the social media timelines and yet, I didn’t know it was MG’s 220th today.
Fuck.