— Divan-e-Ghalib, from the ghazal "muddat hui hai yaar ko mehmaan kiye hue"
About this quote
देवनागरी
फिर उसी बेवफ़ा पे मरते हैं
फिर वही ज़िंदगी हमारी है
English
Again I am dying for the same faithless one — again, that same old life is mine.
What it means
Relapse as destiny: knowing better changes nothing, the heart re-enrolls in its old course. The rueful comedy of returning to what wounded us — everyone recognises the syllabus.
The engine of the couplet is the word phir, used twice, and the second one does the real damage: the first phir makes the relapse an incident, the second — phir wahi zindagi hamari hai — makes it the shape of an entire life. And marte hain works two ways at once, the idiom for being mad about someone and the plain sense of dying, so devotion and self-destruction share a single verb. Note too that he says hamari hai, ours, mine: he is not complaining about this life, he is claiming it, which is why the couplet shrugs where self-pity would sigh.
What it teaches you
Stop treating each return to the same person or habit as a fresh failure needing a fresh vow. Count the returns instead — if this is the fourth, plan for the fifth: decide now what you will do in the first hour after you give in, who you will tell, what you will not send. A pattern you have named can be managed; a pattern you keep being surprised by gets to run the whole life.
अर्थ और सीख
फिर उसी बेवफ़ा पर जान देना, फिर वही पुरानी ज़िंदगी — जानते हुए भी वहीं लौट जाना। दिल की इस ज़िद को ग़ालिब ने हँसते हुए क़ुबूल किया है।
हर बार लौटने को नई हार मानकर नई क़सम न खाइए। अपनी आदत को पहचानिए और अगली बार के लिए पहले से इंतज़ाम कीजिए।
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 “muddat hui hai yaar ko mehmaan kiye hue”. Transliteration and English rendering are our own.
