Hafeez Jalandari

Sometimes, I am entranced by the way honest poets and writers live, true to what they do. (OK, one may have different levels of threshold, but truth is truth and falsehood, falsehood.) And, I often wonder that possibly what do they eat which make them so fearless and sublime in thought that they tend to become priceless?

They never stop committing the crimes of innocence. Are they childish? No, they don't look funny nor are they vindictive. Then what are they? What feed their hearts, which are like omnibus books of dreams and truths? And, they mean it, i.e, their outwardly 'fanciful' looking hopes. What is more worrying to me is the degree of their certainty and unshakable faith in good. They're my gladiators, whom pen's ink is more nobler than a martyr's blood. It may for one reason be so that their job is to decode the nature and the revelations it contains. Just as one such poet, Allama Iqbal, once wrote beautifully:

The world-spirit conceals the various phases of her inner life in symbols. The universe is nothing but a great symbol. But she never takes the trouble to interpret these symbols for us. It is the duty of the poets to interpret them and reveal their meaning to humanity. It would, therefore, appear that the poet and world spirit are opposed to each other; since the former reveals what the later conceals.

Today, it is said, Hafeez Jalandari died. And this post is a tribute to him. No matter what ideologies you may have. You may be critical of his writings in the first place that, you might like think, he took a wrong approach for reforming his decaying nation by singing the glories of past and deploring the present. Instead, you may be of the opinion, he should have been extracting lessons from the history which led to the downfall of his nation and not the other way around. Criticism accepted. But, for many reasons I will support the cause of this man who wrote "magnum opus Shah Nama Islam in four volumes" and created the National anthem of Pakistan. Even though I detest being a strict nationalist.

First, that the duty of poet is not conveying the rigorous 'logical truth(s)', rather he's yearning for beauty and imagination. Therefore, by appealing to emotion, his success lies in moving the hearts of his audience, and better be, stimulating them to reflect and act. He had a part in the creation of a nation. He had a dream. He went beyond the frustrated hopeless men. To quote again poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal from his Stray Reflections, he said:

Nations are born in the hearts of poets; they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.

But, what about a politican who is also a poet?