— Divan-e-Ghalib, from the ghazal "hain aur bhi duniya mein sukhanwar"
About this quote
देवनागरी
हैं और भी दुनिया में सुख़नवर बहुत अच्छे
कहते हैं कि ‘ग़ालिब’ का है अंदाज़-ए-बयाँ और
English
There are many fine poets in the world — but they say Ghalib’s style of saying is something else.
What it means
Ghalib grants his rivals their talent and keeps the one thing that cannot be imitated: the manner. Style, not subject, is the signature — every artist who ever felt inimitable quotes this line.
Notice who is speaking: kehte hain, ‘they say’ — the compliment is reported, not claimed, so Ghalib never has to make the boast in his own voice while still getting it on the page. The praise of the rivals is unstinting and unironic, bahut achhe, with no qualifier hidden in it. And the couplet ends on aur, ‘other, different’, left deliberately unfilled: he refuses to say what the difference consists of, and that refusal is itself the demonstration. Read as simple vanity the line loses its best joke, which is that the vain sentence belongs to someone else.
What it teaches you
Two usable moves. First, concede the field generously and specifically — naming what rivals genuinely do well costs nothing and makes the distinction you then claim believable, whereas diminishing them makes it sound defensive. Second, let the claim be attributed rather than asserted, and leave it undefined: in a bio, a pitch or an interview, ‘people say the tone is unusual’ lands where ‘my tone is unusual’ does not, and a style you reduce to a formula becomes a thing others can copy.
अर्थ और सीख
शायर तो और भी अच्छे हैं, पर ‘अंदाज़-ए-बयाँ’ ग़ालिब का ही है। हुनर की नक़ल हो सकती है, अंदाज़ की नहीं।
दूसरों की तारीफ़ पूरी और सच्ची कीजिए, फिर वह एक चीज़ बताइए जो सिर्फ़ आप करते हैं — और उसे परिभाषा में मत बाँधिए। अपनी बड़ाई ख़ुद गाने से बेहतर है कि वह दूसरों के कहे में सुनाई दे।
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 “hain aur bhi duniya mein sukhanwar”. Transliteration and English rendering are our own.
