— Divan-e-Ghalib, from the ghazal "koi ummeed bar nahin aati"
About this quote
देवनागरी
मौत का एक दिन मुअय्यन है
नींद क्यों रात भर नहीं आती
English
The day of death is fixed — then why does sleep not come all night?
What it means
If the end is already scheduled, worry changes nothing — so why the insomnia? Ghalib catches the absurdity of anxiety in one homely image: dreading a certainty as if vigilance could postpone it.
The two halves are pitched in different languages. Muayyan is an official word — appointed, entered in a register, the vocabulary of a clerk fixing a date — while neend and raat bhar are as domestic as bedding. The grand certainty and the small sleepless body are made to share one line of verse, and they do not fit. Crucially, the second half is a question and stays one; no answer is supplied and none is implied. The couplet is usually pressed into service as fatalist comfort — the date is set, so relax — but that reading needs a full stop where Ghalib put a question mark. He is not consoling himself. He is recording that the consolation, though logically airtight, does not work, and the failure of good reasoning against fear is the actual subject.
What it teaches you
Stop treating night-time fear as a reasoning error you can correct by reasoning. You already know the argument — the outcome is fixed, worry changes nothing, the meeting is in nine hours — and knowing it has never once returned you to sleep, because the fear was never held in place by a bad premise. At two in the morning the argument is not the intervention; it is the thing keeping you awake, since each rehearsal proves again that you are still up. Change the target: address the body and the night — get out of bed, keep the lights low, do something dull with your hands — and leave the logic for daylight, where it belongs and where it might even be useful.
अर्थ और सीख
मौत का दिन तो तय है — फिर रात भर नींद क्यों नहीं आती? जो टल नहीं सकता उसकी फ़िक्र में जागना — इंसानी बेचैनी पर सबसे सटीक शेर।
डर को दलील से नहीं हराया जा सकता — तर्क बिलकुल सही होकर भी नींद नहीं लाता। रात में ख़ुद से बहस करने के बजाय शरीर और माहौल पर काम कीजिए, सोचने का काम दिन पर छोड़ दीजिए।
Where it comes from
An authentic couplet from the Divan-e-Ghalib, the collected Urdu ghazals of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869), from the ghazal beginning “koi ummeed bar nahin aati”. Transliteration and English rendering are our own.
