Confessions of a mochaholic

I am a self-confessed mochaholic. Every weekend that I am in town, I visit the local mocha-bar and revel in the ecstasy of the drinks served at the local brewery. Sifar starts off this post confessing to his Starbucks addiction, but won't dwell on it for long. He wants to take his readers from the wasted monotonicity of travelogues (the last three posts) to the aroma of a freshly pressed Sher-a-latte. As I write in third-person I must mention I do owe this style to a lot of characters from Scrubs...remember the TOD and Cole from the new episodes?

Btw IMHO the new Scrubs is quite a cheap let down compared to the classic and although Bill Lawrence clearly states that the ninth season should be considered a totally new series (Scrubs Med. School), the producers ABC is having a hard time to let go off the original series title amid the omens of losing viewership (owing to the exodus of Zach Braff and Judy Reyes, two of shows main casts).

Today's Sher-a-latte is centered around a long due critique of Daag. I have been suffering from Daagmania over the past few weeks and unlike the vanilla suffering, this has been a blessing. I was blessed with an opportunity to listen some very good couplets, revisit some which I didn't know were Daag's. Daag Dehlvi was an Urdu poet who lived in the 19th Century. Urdu poets usually have a nom de plume (takhallus in Urdu) and Daag had his. Nawab Mirza Khan hailed from Delhi and was probably referring to the pain, the strife, the taint, the grief he had in his life and thus wrote under the pseudonym Daag Dehlvi. A lot of his ghazals have been sung by notable singers like Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali.

Today, we will talk about two of his couplets. I have no idea which parent ghazals these shers belong to. The first one I want to tie back to the title of the post and we"ll analyze in the Sher-A-Day form. I first heard it in a rare audio recording of Dr. Vasantrao Deshpande expressing his views on Urdu Poetry:

ज़ािहद शराब िपने दे मसज़िद में बैठ कर
या फ़िर वो जगह बता दे जहाँ पर खुदा नही ।

Verbatim:

ज़ािहद - follower, priest.

Literatim:

O' priest, let me drink in the mosque,
or else tell me a place where there is no god.

Discussion:

Clearly this sher is centered around the omni-presence of God. It challenges the very institution of a "temple". It asks questions of these ardent followers of god, who go to the temple and pray thinking that God would forgive them of all their worldly sins and help them overcome the hurdles in life. The very fact that god is ubiquitous, begs the question, how can a pious person commit all these sins during his day-to-day life and yet when within the confines of these so called temple-places, pretend to be all devout and ethical and can get away with asking for forgiveness. He cannot. The sher while making a mockery of the classical idea of worship asks of individuals to stay pious, committed on taking the high road, and hold themselves to higher moral standards in all walks of their lives. A gem of a couplet; I wonder if my interpretative liberties do any real justice to it; but then so is true with any poem. The "artha" of the poem is totally up to the reader's discernment. While the verbatim meaning is straightforward and poses an impasse for the priestly clan, in my opinion this sher has sarcasm written all over it.

The second sher, I am sure has been heard by everyone in one form or the other. I heard it for the first time in my 10th grade Hindi class during Summer vacations. Our tutor, Mr. Dubey was an un-assuming character who wore Premchand, Harivanshrai Bacchan and the likes on his sleeves. For the teenagers within us, his couplets and knowledge of literature were awesome things to hang on to, so we could listen to them and show-off using them on the first chance we got to. One fine summer afternoon, while teaching Godaan or something similar from our Hindi text books, he blurted it out of nowhere. It had a tremendous impact on my then teenaged mind and taught me how easy/difficult it is to overcome a tragedy that is love. I am pretty sure I didn't understand what love was back then, but the notion did seem appealing. So here is the couplet:

तू है हरजाई तो अपना भी ये तेॊर सही,
तुम नही अेॊर सही, अेॊर नही, अेॊर सही।

This one is a classical break-up couplet. It talks about the lover who is shattered by his paramour leaving him(her). The harsh reality of a relationship failure strikes hard, but is soon transformed into care-free thoughts. The heart-broken dude or dame (well it hardly happens with girls; their gestation period of moving on is typically a little longer than guys) is ready to move on and knows for sure that there will be others who would come along the way. The lover convinces himself that there are others out there and his love isn't worthy of being trampled over by the unfaithful and rash acts of his "ex". I am sure a whole chunk of us can relate to these lines and have heard them or used them at sometime or the other.

So here goes to all the people in love out there on v-day..hang on to what you got, and treat them with utmost TLC and make them feel special, else rest assured that sooner or later they will move on.

--Sifar.