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When the Applause Faded, Sāhir Ludhiānavi Remained

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When the lights dimmed and the final note dissolved into silence on the night of 16 January, I believed it was over. The third show. The final bow. A fitting finale in Lucknow to Sāhir: Har Ik Pal Ka Shayar . Perhaps even an epilogue, a narrative closure arrived at with dignity and grace. What followed was the familiar ritual. Smiles. Handshakes. Photographs. Selfies. That pleasant, aching exhaustion which comes only after something honestly given. And knowing Sāhir as I have come to know him, I half expected him to murmur, with his customary irony, “Bas, ab itna hi tha (Here it ends, that is it). ” But Sāhir did not leave. He stayed in the softened gaze of an audience unwilling to rise from their seats, as though one careless step beyond the Sant Gadge Auditorium might fracture the spell the evening had cast. He lingered in the silent embraces backstage, where costumes were shed but emotions were not, where words were unnecessary because feeling had already spoken. And he res...
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Bayān-e-Ghālib: From Ghazals to Stage, the Voyage Goes On

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  I have chronicled the journey of Bayān-e-Ghālib before, most recently in the blog I penned following our Delhi performance (see reference at the end). In the interest of brevity, I shall offer only a concise recounting of those earlier reflections and swiftly turn to the events and experiences that have unfolded since. A sagacious senior once shared with me advice that became an anchor in my life: while it is natural and noble to have dreams, four things must precede them—your family, your friends, your health, and your spirit. Departing from the chorus that urges youngsters to "chase their dreams," he advised patience: nurture the fire of your dreams, let it simmer, and wait for the right moment. When it comes, seize it with full commitment, guided by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam: "Dream is not what you see in sleep but is the thing which doesn't let you sleep." “Go wisely and slowly. They stumble that run fast,” Shakespeare warns through Friar Lawrence in R...
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God: Alive in Debates, Missing in Evidence: An Agnostic's Ringside with Irreverent Uncles

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  ‘God is dead’, Nietzsche announced in the late nineteenth century, not as a boast but as a diagnosis, bracketing the question of whether God ever lived at all . He was not celebrating the demise of a deity; he was lamenting the collapse of a shared moral universe once sustained by belief. His warning was less theological than civilisational. A century and a half later, God has neither died nor decisively lived. He survives, stubbornly, inside arguments, television studios, debating halls, newspaper columns, and, most relentlessly, WhatsApp forwards. This shifts the issue away from existence itself, toward something more uncomfortable: not whether God exists, but whether debating His existence leads us anywhere at all. The recent television debate on Lallantop on the existence of God, the widely discussed face-off between Dr. Javed Akhtar , the celebrated poet, lyricist, screenwriter, and avowed atheist, and Mufti Shamail Nadwi , a religious cleric and scholar, illustrates ...
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The Rise of a Truly Atmanirbhar India: From Assembly to Imagination

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  At the outset, allow me to recap a key point from an earlier blog in which I discussed what, in my view, embodies the true spirit of Atmanirbhar Bharat. (The piece is referenced at the end.): Two tribes of opinion repeatedly torment me. First are the zealots who chant Vishwaguru while reality smoulders quietly behind them. For them, Indian Railways (IR) is racing ahead, facts and derailments notwithstanding, and hype substitutes for delivery. At the opposite pole sit those who view IR as a hopeless relic, incapable of tightening a nut without divine intervention and a five-year committee report. In their eyes, every success is a fluke and every reform a failure. Both camps are insufferable in their own ways. One worships the global to the point of paralysis, the other clings to a parochial fantasy world. The truth, as we see frequently, lies somewhere in between. We need to be sensibly local without being delusional, global without being derivative or imitative. For all w...
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