Grecian Urn

  Mirza Ghalib’s death anniversary on February 15, which coincided with Basant Panchami this year, passed without the enthusiasm witnessed on his birthday (December 27). A visit to  Gali Mir Qasim Jan in the morning, unfurls nothing unusual at his haveli, part of which has been turned into a memorial. On setting my feet in I found an old man was standing outside with his grandson, waiting for a rickshaw to take the boy to the madrassa.  Asked about Ghalib, he frowned his brows and went on, “You are talking, about someone who did not set a good example all his life. He passed his days in romantic reveries and the evenings at mushairas or in drinking and courting dancing girls. Such a Mussalman hardly needs to be remembered. Even though he lived next to a masjid, he hardly ever visited it.” To show off his scholarship, made a wisecrack of a couplet: “Masjid ke zer sai ek ghar bana liya hai /Ek banda-i-qamina hamsai khuda hai”. If the man thought of himself as such a wretche...

How many times in school have you uttered the name — ‘Hiuen Tsang was a Chinese traveller who came to India during the reign of Harsha Vardhana”! Well, an introduction dedicated to this magnanimous personality is both an audacity, at the same time a fool’s attempt! However, Personally speaking, I was really astounded when I came to know that this personality travelled all the way to India, from China, risking his own life? I was probably in class seven when this piece of information struck my head hard. How can someone possibly on earth be such a simpleton? For learning…risking own life! But now at 25 when I am a tad bit mature I can understand what an indelible impact this man had left on the making of Oriental history! Historians rely a great deal upon his book Born into a family of scholars for generations, Hiuen Tsang, alternatively Xuanzang, received a classical Confucian educational prodigy in his youth. But his younger brother cultivated in him a keen insight of kn...