#faizahmadfaizpoetry #wisedumbnepali #wisedumb #nepalicontentcreator
I was against the smoking ban that had been purported to seep Kathmandu Valley a few months ago because I don't know if my favorite writers could have done it without smoking. Faiz is a glaring example of this. He was the man who famously pronounced "Exercise is for laborers".
If you read Faiz deeply (and there’s no other way to read him well), you get a sense that he couldn’t have “chosen” to become a poet- he always “had” it. When asked of Faiz if he believed in a God, he said that he was a believer in the same sense that Rumi was. Rumi’s unforgettable lines:
“Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript oƒ a divine letter..”
The fact that Faiz was already a believer in the divinity of every person is reflected in his most famous poem (हम देखेंगे):
और राज करेगी ख़ल्क़-ए-ख़ुदा
जो मैं भी हूँ और तुम भी हो
He rejected all typical notions of God and didn’t like to be dictated what one should believe in. He lived for love, with love, and had an excess of it like very few others had:
आइए हाथ उठाएँ हम भी
हम जिन्हें रस्म-ए-दुआ याद नहीं
हम जिन्हें सोज़-ए-मोहब्बत के सिवा
कोई बुत कोई ख़ुदा याद नहीं
After suffering a hiatus where poetry just didn’t flow out of him, his arrest and the subsequent incarceration during the Rawalpindi case gave him the time to observe the outside world in the most detailed ways imaginable, as he observed trees and flowers from his peephole of solitary confinement. The muse of poetry was back, his poems ebbed and flowed, and when it came, it came in the most sumptuous ways.
A lifelong dedicatee to the socialist cause, he rejected a handsome salary and demanded a wage lower than that of the teachers of a school he presided over as a principal. Only when the directors of the educational enterprise let him know that a principal of a school couldn’t be paid lower than the teachers did he accept a salary that was acceptable to the board of directors.
One could read his poems as a Buddhist and say that he had elements of Buddhahood in him, realizing the fleeting nature of the universe. When my heart is heavied with a sense of sorrow, I often go to Faiz:
दिल ना-उमीद तो नहीं नाकाम ही तो है
लम्बी है ग़म की शाम मगर शाम ही तो है
Faiz was a man of love:
तेरा ग़म है तो ग़म-ए-दहर का झगड़ा क्या है..
तेरी आँखों के सिवा दुनिया में रक्खा क्या है
Of revolution (as he ponders into the sad state of affairs of the India-Pakistan partrition):
ये दाग़ दाग़ उजाला ये शब-गज़ीदा सहर
वो इंतिज़ार था जिस का ये वो सहर तो नहीं
ये वो सहर तो नहीं जिस की आरज़ू ले कर
चले थे यार…
He was a man of everyone and everything, and was known to even his enemies as “ हमारा Faiz”
Follow us on Social Media :
Facebook : / wisedumbnepaliforu
TikTok : / wisedumb2019
Instagram : / wisedumb_nepali
Contact Us : knoway.studios@gmail.com
About Us :
The two men who are at the forefront of WiseDumb podcasts are Karan Bhatta and Rupesh Sah who are researchers, educators and media personalities. You can reach out to them for a collaboration:
/ karan-bhatta-061484263
/ rupesh-kumar-sah-10227...