GAME OF LOVE ---- BY GHALIB

YEH  ISHQ  NAHIN ASSAN----

In moments of reflection, deeper meanings of fleeting thoughts emerge. At different times and in varied states of mind many other interpretation of the same thoughts surface. Just take this Urdu couplet by Ghalib----

YEH  ISHQ  NAHIN  ASSAN  ITNA  TO  SAMAJH  LEJEEYE

EK  AAG   KA  DARYA  HAI  AUR   DOOB  KER  JANA  HAI

Please understand, the game of love is not a child’s play. It likens crossing an ocean of fire by drowning in it (to meet the beloved).

A youngman will be elated to read these passionate lines of Ghalib. A wiseman, while recalling this verse, will tread carefully in love, knowing that attachment generates a lot of pain and sorrow. The one who has been in love will acknowledge these lines to be true.

All of us also believe that love is the need and necessity of human life. Love is an ocean of bliss; hatred is a punishment to one’s own self. Love provides a great relief to those who have  been cared less. It is the same emotion that makes us cherish the Divine.

Cynics and critics comment that this ‘romance’ is all hogwash, sort of fairy-tales, poetic imagination and diversion/dissipation of entropic energy. Heer-ranjha, Sassi-Pannu, Romeo-Juliet and many other die hard lovers vanished in pain with no gain.

  

How would a mystic mind interpret Ghalib’s lines?  Perhaps something like this ----Love transcends both physical and abstract— it demolishes all those who are involved in this play. When lovers pass through an ocean of fire nothing survives. The lover and the beloved vaporize in the flames of fire. Now somebody must answer this ---- if Ishq is the negation of existence then who can describe what Love is!!

If ‘you’ and ‘me’ survive in the game of Ishq—it only represents something else—infatuation, desires, I-ness and ego etc---but not Love.

None can however decipher the mood in which Ghalib wrote the above lines or perhaps he left the option open for the imagination of his readers. But he made a point---that total surrender and self-annihilation  (doob ke aag ke darya se jana) are the pre requisites of Ishq in Ruhaniaat.