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Saturday, March 12, 2011

The Beauty of Shayri

चाँद सा मिसरा अकेला है मेरे कागज़ पर,
छत पे जाओ मेरा शेर मुकम्मल कर दो.

Chaand sa misra akela hai mere kaagaz par,
chhat pe aa jao mera sher mukammal kar do.

I was listening to the recording of a nashisht (a recital of Urdu poetry) from the time when I was in India, in my friend's village. This sher was quoted in that.

Let me see if I can explain this beautiful thing in English.

A "sher" is a couplet, two lines that need to say something meaningful, and a "misra" is one line, so a complete sher needs to have two "misra"s. In Indian poetry beauty of a girl is often compared to the beauty of the Moon. So, this sher says, "This single line is lonely on my paper like Moon in the sky. If you come out on the roof my sher will be complete!" Of course, it's about a million times more beautiful in original Urdu.

5 comments:

Always Happy said...

Very Nice!! [urdu version, ofcourse. :)]

I like the pic too. Perfect.

Sunil Goswami said...

Why, thank you, AH!
The picture I am learning from you. :)

Sunil Goswami said...

Yes, I didn't use to post a picture with every post but I have seen how nice your posts look because you put a relevant picture with each. So, I am learning :)

Always Happy said...

Aha! I see.

I feel good. Someone appreciates the hard work I do in finding relevant pic for my posts.

Sunil Goswami said...

Yes, indeedy! And you do a great job! That's what inspired me!

Plus the fact that I use Pulse RSS reader on my Android devices, and it uses a grid UI to display posts. And I saw how good the picture'd posts look as compared to the text-only posts.