— Divan-e-Ghalib, from the ghazal "hazaaron saal nargis"
About this quote
देवनागरी
हज़ारों साल नर्गिस अपनी बे-नूरी पे रोती है
बड़ी मुश्किल से होता है चमन में दीदावर पैदा
English
For a thousand years the narcissus weeps over its blindness — only rarely is one born in the garden who truly sees.
What it means
The narcissus flower resembles an eye without light. Ghalib’s point: beauty and truth wait ages for a single person capable of really seeing them. Genuine perception — the deedawar, the seer — is the rarest birth of all.
The second line quietly moves the defect. Line one puts the lack in the flower — the eye-shaped thing that has no light of its own — and you expect line two to pity it. Instead the shortage is relocated to the garden, which cannot produce the one who looks. Deedawar is not a visionary or a prophet; it is closer to a connoisseur, the one with a trained eye, the beholder rather than the beheld. And paida is the verb of birth, not of effort — such an eye is born, and the garden waits. The usual misquotation makes this a tribute to the rare genius or the great leader. It is the opposite: the rare thing is not the flower, the talent or the beauty. It is the audience.
What it teaches you
Treat attention, not talent, as the scarce thing in the room. Two practical consequences. First, when something near you has gone unrecognised — a colleague’s work, a book nobody cites, a place you pass daily — stop taking the neglect as evidence about its quality; the absence of a seer says nothing about what went unseen. Second, when you dismiss something in ten seconds, check whether the failure is in the object or in your eye: go back to one thing you wrote off and stay with it long enough to be wrong about it. Becoming the deedawar is ordinary work — repeated looking at one thing, not a wider sweep over many.
अर्थ और सीख
नर्गिस हज़ारों साल अपनी बे-नूरी पर रोती है — देखने वाली आँख, सच्चा क़द्रदान, सदियों में एक पैदा होता है। क़द्र करने वाले की क़ीमत यही है।
कमी अक्सर देखी जाने वाली चीज़ में नहीं, देखने वाली आँख में होती है। किसी काम या इंसान को ख़ारिज करने से पहले उसे इतना वक़्त दीजिए कि वह ठीक से दिखाई दे सके।
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 “hazaaron saal nargis”. Transliteration and English rendering are our own.
