UP Elections 2022: A talk show with Ghālib and Shakespeare

Anchor: Welcome Mr. Ghālib and Mr. Shakespeare to this talk session on the recently concluded Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, 2022. As always, I am in awe, I am really impuissant to introduce your greatness, so I humbly solicit you both to introduce yourselves!

 

Ghālib: And, as always I am not going to say,

 

Pūchhte  haiñ vo  ki Ghālib kaun hai

koī   batlāo   ki  ham  batlā.eñ   kyā

(Although Ghālib, the passionate lover, is well-known, the beloved teasingly asks as to who Ghālib is and the former now asks the gathering rhetorically to advise him on a possible reply)

 

I will instead say that,

 

Hogā  koī  aisā   bhī   ki  Ghālib   ko  na  jaane

shā.ir to vo achchhā hai pa badnām bahut hai

(badnām: disreputable, ill-famed. Is there anyone, any unfortunate individual, who does not know Ghālib, that is, there is no such person who does not recognize Ghālib. He is certainly a very good poet but, like most charismatic individuals, he is also egregiously infamous)

 

Anchor: And you, sire, what’s your name and…

 

Shakespeare: And, ‘me too’, like this chappie Gaulib, will desist from quoting Juliet, from my creation, the most moving love story of all time, when she said to Romeo, “..What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet. So Shakespeare would, were he not William called…”, because, unlike that pretentious bunch, led by the king of Navarre, I  actualized in Love’s labour’s Lost, with the splashy king guy saying, “Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of death…”. I am one and only, the bard of Avon, a living legend, to the extent that years after my passing, this sterling swain Charles Dickens wrote, “The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery, and I tremble every day lest something should turn up.”

 

I will, however, favour this brat Gaulib with some sage dissuasion, like I had Iago telling Casio in Othello, “…reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving…"

 

Anchor: Sir, this is not about your rivalrous tug-of-war, this is about the just concluded election in UP, with Yogi ji emerging, to everyone’s amazement, as a clear winner. I need you both to…

 

Ghālib: Pipe down, janab-e-anchor. All you media guys are ahmaqs (fools). I knew he would win but all this win and loss amounts to nothing. He may be a jogi (monk) in saffron but his bhagwa (saffron) outfit is nothing but a paper garment, let him not start smelling any success in this victory.

 

Naqsh fariyādī hai kis kī shoḳhi-e-tahrīr kā

kāġhzī hai pairahan har  paikar-e-tasvīr kā

(Naqsh: picture, portrait, an artistic work,  imagination, map, influence, fariyādī: supplicant petitioner: shoḳhi-e-tahrīr: mischievous writing, playfulness, kāġhzī: made of paper, pairahan: clothes, dress, apparel, robe, paikar-e-tasvīr: the figure in a picture. From whose artful hands does he aspire for benefaction, everyone is an abject supplicant in a paper attire)

 

Shakespeare: Ha! Even Feste, the clown, in Twelfth Night knows more than this inflated dunce Gaulib, “…Cucullus non facit monachum, that’s as much to say as I wear not motley in my brain…”, he said, which means a mere cowl does not make a monk, his monk’s robe is the only holy thing about him and you can’t judge a book by its cover. He is nothing but a shrewd politician and this Ackilesh and his ilk are no match for him. Remember what I made Hamlet say, in that epic work of mine, when he sees the gravedigger singing at grave-making and throwing up a skull, “It might be the pate of a politician, which this ass now o'erreaches, one that would circumvent God, might it not?”.

 

Anchor: OK sir, so about Akhilesh. What hit him?

 

Ghālib: Simple. The fellow is a an indecisive lappujhanna (laughing stock). Goes first to Pappu, then Behen ji and now this motley group of lafantars, chughads and ghumakkads (ruffians, owls and hobos).

 

Chaltā huuñ thoḌī duur har ik tez-rau ke saath

pahchāntā  nahīñ  huuñ   abhī  rāhbar  ko maiñ

(tez-rau: fast speed, rāhbar: guide, leader. Short distances I walk with everyone who moves rapidly, I know not yet who the guide is.)

 

Shakespeare: Wait. Like the shepherd in The Winter’s Tale, I think Mulayam, the unspeakable patriarch, said to himself, “I am past more children, but my sons and daughters will be all gentlemen born.” Who knows about all his sons and daughters, or his daughters-in-law for that matter as they count for more, but this Ackilesh is confused, like Hamlet’s dilemma of,“to be or not to be” in choosing to be either a mafioso politician or a gentleman? Can you be both at the same time?. You cannot.

 

Anchor: Sir, moving on, Priyanka Gandhi and Congress put in a lot of hard work but it all came to nought. What do you think?

 

Shakespeare: Dear Mr. Anchor, “LaḌkī huuñ, laḌ saktī huuñ, I am a girl, I can fight”, indeed!”. She is not a LaḌkī, she is a 50-year old woman and who does she want to fight with? What good would be fighting this celibate monk? “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”, as Gertrude says in Hamlet. The problem really lies with her elder brother, remember, what the good Friar Lawrence tells Romeo in that greatest love story ever written, “…Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.”. She should have realized, like Portia, the wife of the evil Brutus, in Julius Caesar, that, “…I have a man’s mind but a woman’s might. How hard it is for women to keep counsel…”, that all she had was her brother’s fickle mind and her emaciated party’s poor strength. And above all, reverting to Cymbeline, who could not see through the machinations of his poisonous queen, tells Cornelius, “Who is’t can read a woman?”. And now, if you think I am discombobulated, it is your denseness.

 

Anchor (aside): Mad as a coot, is he not? Chāchā (uncle), this bard is all fouled up. You should…

 

Ghālib: Ignore this dandy angrez (Englishman), he is an ignoramus. Let me modify one of my shers a bit for him, “Bak rahā hai junūñ meñ kyā kyā kuchh, kuchh na samjhe koī ḳhudā bhī kya kare” (The fellow is ranting and raving gibberish in his madness, no one would understand him, what can even God do?). Anchor mohtaram (respected gentleman), who would know this entitled family of India better than me? Her brother is a simpleton but a sahrā-navard (wanderer in the wilderness), except that his sahrā is more likely in Bangkok or Milan, why did he join politics at all? He has mastered the art of losing, with his party staring at death every day.

 

Kahūñ kis se maiñ ki kyā hai shab-e-ġham burī balā hai

mujhe   kyā   burā    thā    marnā     agar    ek     baar   hotā

Hue mar ke ham jo rusvā hue kyuuñ na ġharq-e-dariyā

na   kabhī    janāza    uThtā   na    kahīñ     mazār   hotā

(shab-e-ġham: evening or night of sorrow, balā: calamity, tumult, rusvā: dishonoured, despondent, ġharq-e-dariyā: drowned in the river, janāze: funeral bier and procession, mazār: mausoleum, shrine. To whom should I complain that a gloomy night is a bad calamity, dying just once would not be bad, this trip to my grave every night? After death I am being reviled, why did I not simply drowned in a river, leaving no remnant to be defiled or no grave site to be constructed)

 

As for the mohtarma (honorable lady), what did she get into?

 

Dil-e-nāzuk pe us ke rahm aatā hai mujhe Ghālib

na  kar  sargarm  us   kāfir ko  ulfat āzmāne meñ

(Dil-e-nāzuk: delicate heart, rahm: pity, sargarm: active, busy, kāfir: infidel, beloved, ulfat: love, friendship, āzmāne: to try, test. Ghālib, the lover, says that he feels pity for the delicate heart of the lady and therefore she should not be provoked into engaging in an experiment of love.)

 

Anchor: Ok, OK, gentlemen, maybe Priyanka is too dainty for heavy-duty electioneering but what about the redoubtable Mayavati?

 

Shakespeare: “Frailty, thy name is woman!”, I made the indecisive bloke Hamlet say. In my Elizabethan period, women did not have liberty and freedom in that patriarchal society and so, they were weak characters but things changed with time and I inspired James Joyce to write, “Frailty, thy name is marriage.”, and that is why this Amazon lady Mayavati is unmarried to raise her voice against inequality and injustice in society. Why people did not vote for her is baffling, the downtrodden people of UP must be turncoats, not knowing how to love rightly, getting influenced by this alteration-agent monk and this remover Ackilesh, as I said in Sonnet 116, “…Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove…”. There is otherwise a lot to be said about these women politicians, just as York did while ticking off Queen Margaret that they are nothing like what a woman should be but are more of a tiger disguised as women in Henry VI, part III,

 

"’Tis beauty that doth oft make women proud,

But God He knows thy share thereof is small.

’Tis virtue that doth make them most admired;

The contrary doth make thee wondered at.

’Tis government that makes them seem divine;

The want thereof makes thee abominable…

… tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide..."

 

Ghālib: Mr. Bhala Hilao (shake a spear), apne omlet shomlet sunnat vunnat harri varri ko sameto abhī (Pack up your Hamlet, sonnet and Henry now). I should call for that Lucknow-wala Meer Anis to write a marsiya (elegy) for her party, as it is something infra dig for me to do. But, for the nonce, let me cover it as I see in it total annihilation and disappearance of a beautiful personality,

 

Sab kahāñ kuchh lāla-o-gul  meñ numāyāñ ho ga.iiñ

ḳhaak  meñ  kyā  sūrateñ  hoñgī ki pinhāñ ho ga.iiñ

(lāla-o-gul: tulips and roses, numāyāñ: visible, displayed, conspicuous, ḳhaak: dust, ash, sūrateñ: faces, manners, options, pinhāñ: hidden. Wondering at some of exceptional great beauties, one notes that tulips and roses are the dust and ashes of only some of the beauteous ones who blended in the dust; many great beauties have ended as dust but only a few of these effaced faces are now resplendently and gloriously displayed as tulip and rose flowers.)

 

Anchor: Enough! No more questions, your closing remark about the elections and the leaders…

 

Shakespeare: Fine but do not call me with this drinking Smart Alec native again. From As You Like It, you would know Jaques saying that, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances…” But more specifically, as to who the people choose and reject,  go recall the conversation I created between two officers in Coriolanus, when the second one says profoundly, “Faith, there had been many great men that have flattered the people, who ne’er loved them; and there be many that they have loved, they know not wherefore: so that, if they love they know not why, they hate upon no better a ground…”

 

Ghālib: You, barbaad firangi barad (spoilt foreigner bard), go shake a dagger as a spear is too big for your reach. As for me, these elections are nothing for me, these insignificant happenings do not touch me at all,

 

Ik khel hai  aurañg-e-sulaimāñ  mire nazdīk

ik    baat   hai     ejāz-e-masīhā   mire aage

Hotā hai  nihāñ gard  meñ  sahrā  mire hote

ghistā hai jabīñ ḳhaak pe dariyā mire aage

(aurañg-e-sulaimāñ: throne of Solomon or an illusion nazdīk: near, ejāz-e-masīhā: marvel, miracle, honour of the messiah, nihāñ: hidden, concealed, gard: dust, sahrā: desert, jabīñ: forehead, ḳhaak: dust, earth, dariyā: river. The throne of mighty Solomon's is something trifling like a game for me and the messiah's miracles are merely common happenings in my presence. Deserts themselves disappear in a cloud of sand in my presence and rivers rub their foreheads on the shore in front of me.)

 

Anchor: God, I have to run away from these specimens, viewers, or these two will make me insane, toodle-oo, back to studio...

 

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