— Divan-e-Ghalib, from the ghazal "koi din gar zindagani aur hai"
About this quote
देवनागरी
क़ैद-ए-हयात-ओ-बंद-ए-ग़म अस्ल में दोनों एक हैं
मौत से पहले आदमी ग़म से निजात पाए क्यों
English
The prison of life and the chains of sorrow are one and the same — why should a man be free of grief before death?
What it means
Life and sorrow are not two things, says Ghalib — to be alive is to be bound. There is a hard consolation in it: grief is not a malfunction of living but its definition, so stop expecting its end.
Notice that both halves of the first line are already confinement words — qaid (prison) and band (fetter) — so saying they are “one and the same” is less a discovery than a tightening: two nouns collapse into a single cell. The second line’s kyun is not a real question but an objection, and nijaat is a word of religious deliverance, which quietly reframes relief from sorrow as something only granted, never taken. The couplet is often read as a death-wish or as permission to give up; the logic runs the other way — it denies that release is on offer at all, and therefore leaves you nothing to do but live inside the sentence.
What it teaches you
Count how much of your energy goes into the question when will this pass rather than into the day itself. If a sorrow has been with you for months, stop building plans that begin after it ends — make the plan carry the sorrow along: the same work, the same hours, with grief as a passenger rather than a roadblock. Waiting is the only part of it you can actually put down.
अर्थ और सीख
ज़िंदगी की क़ैद और ग़म की ज़ंजीर एक ही चीज़ है — जब तक जीवन है, ग़म रहेगा। ग़म को ज़िंदगी की शर्त मान लेना ही ग़ालिब की तसल्ली है।
ग़म कब ख़त्म होगा — यह पूछना बंद कीजिए। दुख के साथ जीने का इंतज़ाम कीजिए, उसके जाने का इंतज़ार नहीं।
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 din gar zindagani aur hai”. Transliteration and English rendering are our own.
