— Divan-e-Ghalib, from the ghazal "bazeecha-e-atfaal hai duniya"
About this quote
देवनागरी
बाज़ीचा-ए-अत्फ़ाल है दुनिया मेरे आगे
होता है शब-ओ-रोज़ तमाशा मेरे आगे
English
The world is a children’s playground before me — night and day, the spectacle plays itself out before my eyes.
What it means
The gaze of a man who has seen through the game: ambition, honour, empire — toys in a sandbox. Detachment with a spectator’s amusement, not a hermit’s escape.
The force sits in the rhyme-phrase mere aage, which returns at the end of both lines and can be heard two ways at once — ‘in front of my eyes’ and ‘compared to me’. That double hearing is what keeps the couplet from being merely wise: the speaker is not only outside the frame, he is measuring the world against himself and finding it small. Note also shab-o-roz: a playground is normally a place one leaves at dusk, but this show has no closing hour, so the watching is not restful. And the world is called a children’s play-field, not a toy — the toys are the things being fought over on it.
What it teaches you
When something has you agitated, write down what is actually at stake in the flattest possible words — a title, a seating order, a number, who was told first. Most of what grips us cannot survive being named that plainly, and the gap between the plain words and the size of your agitation is exactly the distance this couplet is describing. Do this while you are still upset, not afterwards; done afterwards it is just consolation.
अर्थ और सीख
दुनिया एक बच्चों का खेल है और ग़ालिब उसके तमाशबीन — दिन-रात तमाशा चलता है। दुनियादारी से ऐसी बेनियाज़ी ही ग़ालिब की शान है।
जिस बात पर आप परेशान हैं, उसे एक बार सबसे सादे शब्दों में लिख लीजिए — पद, नाम, रक़म, किसे पहले बताया गया। नाम रखते ही अक्सर खेल छोटा दिखने लगता है, और यही फ़ासला ग़ालिब का है।
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 “bazeecha-e-atfaal hai duniya”. Transliteration and English rendering are our own.
