AbhilashTalkies

आरंभ है प्रचंड बोलें मस्तकों के झुंड आज जंग की घड़ी की तुम गुहार दो

The beginning is fierce. And it is not spoken alone. It rises from a झुंड—a crowd of foreheads bowed, now lifted. There’s something primal in this image: a collective of souls stepping forward together, choosing to declare—not whisper, not deliberate, but declare—that this is the hour of reckoning.

Beginnings are often soft, marked by hesitation, but not this one. आरंभ है प्रचंड—the start is not gentle; it is overwhelming. There’s no warm-up to war. No courtesy in courage. It demands full presence, here and now.

आन बान शान या कि जान का हो दान आज एक धनुष के बाण पे उतार दो

What does one place on the arrow’s tip? Honor, pride, dignity—or life itself? This is where metaphor turns literal. To offer one's life is not just to die for a cause, but to give oneself entirely to its direction. Like an arrow drawn back, there is tension, yes, but also aim.

There’s a sacred geometry here—the body, the cause, the arc of flight. To surrender to the bowstring is not weakness; it is will, transformed into movement.

मन करे सो प्राण दे जो मन करे सो प्राण ले वो वही तो एक सर्वशक्तिमान है

This is the stanza of autonomy—raw and uncompromising. The power to give life or take it is the mark of the सर्वशक्तिमान, the all-powerful. But there's an inversion here. Not divine right as imposed authority, but as choice. The one who chooses freely, uncoerced, to offer life or receive death—that is where strength lies.

It’s a line that leaves the reader exposed. What do we do with such unfiltered agency? Can we trust ourselves with it?

कृष्ण की पुकार है ये भागवत का सार है कि युद्ध ही तो वीर का प्रमाण है

This is less about scripture than about the echo within it. कृष्ण’s call is not to rage, but to clarity. The Bhagavad Gita is not a hymn to war—it is a hymn to rightful action. युद्ध becomes the crucible through which the warrior reveals himself—not by victory, but by alignment. By doing what must be done, not for gain, but for धर्म.

The stanza pulses with a paradox: that war, the thing we most dread, may also be the site of our deepest truth.

कौरवों की भीड़ हो या पांडवों का नीर हो जो लड़ सका है वही तो महान है

The choice is no longer about sides. कौरव or पांडव—it doesn’t matter here. भीड़ or नीर, crowd or stream, darkness or dharma—the poet slips past allegiance and touches something deeper.

The line cuts into the idea that righteousness is inherited. That to be born on the "right" side is enough. It isn't. जो लड़ सका है—the one who fought—that’s who is great. Not for whom they fought, but that they stood at all.

There’s something lonely in that realization. That greatness isn’t in bloodline or flag, but in the willingness to enter the fray. Not because one is destined, but because one chooses.

जीत की हवस नहीं किसी पे कोई वश नहीं क्या ज़िन्दगी है ठोकरों पे मार दो

No hunger for victory. No desire for control. This stanza strips war of its spoils and brings it closer to renunciation than aggression.

What kind of life is this? the line seems to ask—if it avoids bruises, if it fears wounds. There is a quiet contempt here for comfort. Not in a scornful way, but as an invitation: to let go of a life built on avoidance. To stop tiptoeing and step fully in.

The word ठोकरों—stumbles, hits, knockdowns—becomes strangely tender. As if falling is a kind of proof that one has lived.

मौत अंत है नहीं तो मौत से भी क्यों डरें ये जाके आसमानों में दहाड़ दो!

If death is not the end, why fear it?

The stanza lifts. It no longer stays close to the ground. It rises, roaring into the sky. दहाड़ दो—roar it into the heavens. There’s something mythic here, yes, but also deeply human. A longing to be heard not just in words, but in vibration, in echo, in storm.

It’s not a challenge to death—it’s an embrace. A willingness to befriend it, walk with it, carry its presence not as dread but as clarity.

वो दया का भाव यकी शौर्य का चुनाव यकी हार का वो घाव तुम ये सोच लो

This is the stanza of discernment. दया—compassion—is not passivity. And शौर्य—valor—is not violence. The real choice is not between kindness and courage, but in understanding their intersection.

To bleed and still choose, to lose and still rise—these are not contradictions, but the form of strength.

हार का वो घाव—the wound of defeat—is not shameful. It is evidence. Of having shown up. Of being in the arena. Of loving something enough to risk failing for it.

यकी भूरे भाल पर जला रहे विजय का लाल लाल ये गुलाल तुम ये सोच लो

The imagery is intimate now. भूरे भाल—a brown forehead, perhaps dusty from battle or time. Upon it, burning red: the लाल गुलाल of victory. But not a flag, not a crown—just color, pigment, ash and bloom.

This isn’t celebration—it’s ritual. The red is not just festive; it’s sacrificial. It burns because it costs something. The poet invites us to think about this red. Not to admire it, but to reckon with it. What does it mean to wear victory not on a medal, but on the skin?

To win, perhaps, is to carry the mark of all that was risked.

रंग केसरि हो या मृदंग केसरि हो या कि केसरि हो ताल तुम ये सोच लो

Now saffron returns, but not as a banner—it’s रंग, it’s मृदंग, it’s ताल. It becomes sound, rhythm, color. This stanza reclaims केसरि from the narrow and returns it to the sacred.

Whether it’s the hue on the cheeks of a dancer, the beat of a war drum, or the tempo of resolve—think about what this saffron means. It is not static; it moves. It pulses in the body, in breath, in the syncopation of action and restraint.

It reminds us that valor is not only in the charge, but in the tempo one keeps through fear.

जिस कवि की कल्पना में ज़िन्दगी हो प्रेम गीत उस कवि को आज तुम नकार दो

This is the sharpest turn—and perhaps the most misunderstood. The poet, up to now in full flame, turns and says: reject the poet who imagines life as only a love song.

It sounds like a betrayal of beauty. But it’s not. It is a challenge to sentimentality. To the softening of truth for comfort’s sake. This rejection is not of love, but of delusion.

The poem insists: love that ignores struggle is not love. Poetry that avoids pain is not vision—it is escape.

To नकार the sweet, untested verse is to honor a love that bleeds, that fights, that endures.

भीगती मांसों में आज फूलती रगों में आज आग की लपट का तुम भगार दो*

And now we arrive at the body—मांसों, flesh, रगों, veins. The fire is no longer metaphor. It pulses beneath the skin. The call is not just to feel it, but to pour it out. भगार दो—release the tempering, the essence.

This is not rage as destruction. It is rage as illumination. As the final, refined oil poured over a moment to make it blaze with truth.

It ends not in conquest, but in offering.

And so, the poem completes itself like a ritual circle. What began as a march ends as a flame. It is not a call to violence, but to clarity. Not to hatred, but to the sacred fury that refuses indifference.

We do not live only in softness. Some days, to love truly, we must burn.

Some melodies don’t fill the room; they fill the pauses between thoughts. Like evening light sliding through a curtain slit, they do not ask for attention—they become it. And so I found myself, quieted, listening to “ये जो ज़िंदगी की किताब है”, where each verse feels like a slow turning of pages in a well-worn diary, the kind bound not in leather, but in lived days.

Life as a book—it is an old metaphor. But in these lines, the metaphor grows vines. It branches into dreams and disasters, laughter and lack. It is not a tale of coherence, but of contradiction. “कहीं इक हसीन सा ख़्वाब है / कहीं जानलेवा अज़ाब है” — one moment, a beautiful dream; the next, an affliction that steals the breath. The song does not try to resolve this. It only names it, softly. As if naming were enough.

And maybe it is. Maybe the true act of noticing is to say: here is shade, and here is sunlight. Not one instead of the other, but both—always both. Somewhere, someone is gaining what another is grieving. Somewhere, a song is rising even as a silence deepens.

The lines turn, and I think of faces—कई चेहरे इसमें छुपे हुए. The hidden selves we carry. The boy who once longed for his father’s approval. The woman who dances in the kitchen when no one is watching. The friend who laughs too loudly, as if trying to drown out something unnamed. These are all pages too, some dog-eared, some scribbled on, some torn at the corners.

And what do we do with such a book? A book that is sometimes cruel, sometimes kind. That hides joy under grief, and grief under joy. That can “छीन लेती है हर ख़ुशी” yet also be “मेहरबाँ बेहिसाब.” We keep reading. Or rather, we keep living. Page after page, moment after moment, even when we do not understand the plot.

This is not a story of triumph. It is not a lesson in resilience. It is simply the song of turning pages. Some soaked in tears. Some scented with laughter. Some blank still, waiting.

And perhaps that is the quiet grace of it all: not in seeking a tidy ending, but in learning how to hold the book gently, even when it trembles in our hands.

Because somewhere, always, “कहीं बरकतों की हैं बारिशें / कहीं तिश्नगी बेहिसाब है.”

I’ve seen him often, alone, walking the same road. Always at the same time of day, when light falls softly on the pavement and the air carries the hush of something remembered.

There’s nothing remarkable about the road. Cracked in places. Dust at the edges. A bench that holds no one. But when he walks it, something else appears. Not beside him, within him. As if the past, long buried, has decided to walk too.

He studied music here, I’m told. Not in a hall or classroom, but under trees. A circle of students. A teacher with thick grey hair and careful eyes. The kind of teacher who didn’t raise his voice. Who made silence part of the lesson.

They learned slowly. Not just to play, but to listen. To wait. To care for each other’s sound. It was never about performance. It was about presence.

Then the teacher died.

He found him, they say, in the study. Slumped to one side, as if the music had gently stepped away. No final word. No recital. Just stillness, and a room left full of breath.

After that, something in him quietened. The others scattered. As students do. But he stayed, at least in rhythm. The teacher had given him a compass. A real one, brass and heavy. But also the kind you can’t hold. The kind that lives behind the ribs, that points not north, but inward.

Now, when he walks, it is not toward anything. It is through. Through old notes. Through the sound of her laughter on a violin string. Through the shared silence that once held them like a home.

The road hasn't changed. But he has.

He carries the music still. In the lift of his shoulders. In the way he doesn't rush. In how his eyes search, not for someone, but for the place inside him that still listens.

The compass does not lead. It remembers.

And so he walks. Alone, yes.

But never without company.

There are friendships that begin like a song—easy, bright, and without preamble. College was like that. The world hadn't arrived with its edges yet. Our dreams were unwritten, our names still soft with possibility.

And then, someone sat beside you in an auditorium. Or lent you their ear. Or waited long after everyone had left. You didn’t call it love. You just called them by name.

Mustafa Mustafa, don’t worry Mustafa… The lyrics didn’t explain. They simply understood. That friendship, then, meant turning up. No grand gestures. Just presence. Just showing up for the snack breaks, the heartbreaks, the underlit lecture hallways where laughter was the only light.

Now years have moved on. But when that song plays, we return. Not to nostalgia, but to the feeling of being seen without having to perform.

Some friendships don’t ask to be remembered. They just stay.

It begins not with music, but with a condition of the soul. A posture, almost—a willingness to break, rather than to harden. In a world that trains us to withhold, to win, to prove, this song is a quiet act of rebellion.

Maula mere le le meri jaan.

This is not just a lyric, but the opening wound. A plea not born of desperation but of devotion. It says: let my life be the bridge. Let my breath bear witness. In a world that monetizes self-preservation, this is a gesture of radical offering. Of letting the heart be known fully—even at a cost.

Tija tera rang tha main to, jiyaa tere dhang se main to.

What we absorb of another—slowly, quietly—often becomes indistinguishable from our own selves. This is a line about having lived so fully in another’s light that we no longer know where they end and we begin. Not mimicry, but mutuality. Not erasure, but transformation.

Too hee tha maula, too hee aan.

To anchor your being in another. To let someone become your origin and your honor. This is not dependency; it is reverence. To say this is to say: everything I built, I built looking in your direction.

Tere sang kheli holi, tere sang thi diwali.

The recollection of shared celebrations—of color and light—evokes not extravagance but intimacy. These lines are a reminder that joy, when shared, becomes sacred. The festivals are not backdrops; they are the texture of a togetherness that once was.

Tere aanganon kee chaaya, tere sang saanvan aayaa.

This is domestic imagery, rich in subtle longing. The shade of a courtyard, the arrival of rain—small signs of seasons spent together. These are not grand gestures but the quiet rituals of belonging. Homes are made this way.

Pher le too chaahe nazaren, chaahe churaa le. Laut ke too aayega re, shart lagaa le.

Here, a turn. The risk of love—of being unseen, of being left. And yet, a stubborn hope. An inner certainty, not of possession, but of resonance. That something once known deeply will find its way back, even if unannounced.

Mittee meri bhee bhuri, vahee mere ghi aur chhuri.

Love is contradiction made visible. The one who feeds you can also cut you. The soil that bears sweetness may still be barren in places. This is not cynicism—it is maturity. A knowing that holds complexity without fleeing from it.

Vahee raanjhe mere, vahee heer.

Myths collapse here. No longer are Ranjha and Heer distant lovers—they are us. This is the merging of legend and living. Our heartbreaks echo theirs, and through that echo, we become timeless.

Tujhse hee roothnaa re, tuje hee manaanaa.

This is the cycle of true affection. To turn away and still turn back. It is the human dance of hurt and healing. There is no finality in this. Only the ongoing work of choosing each other—again, and again.

To live in this song is to understand that staying soft is not the failure of strength, but its flowering. It is to persist in vulnerability when the world offers you armor. To offer your pulse instead of your fists.

Maula mere le le meri jaan.

We return to this line not as we began, but altered. Now, it carries everything we’ve passed through—the festivals, the fights, the myths, the quiet courtyards. It carries the full weight of a life offered in fragments, and still whole.

The song does not end. It lingers. It asks us to sit with our own soft places. To see that the cost of staying soft is high—but the cost of abandoning it, perhaps higher.

It was never about the sound. It was always about the staying.

Some songs do not end when the music fades. They linger like unsent letters in the drawer, or like the scent of a place you once called home. Yeh Jo Des Hai Tera from Swades and Tanhayee from Dil Chahta Hai are such songs—drifting across time, across the dusty roads of memory, across the aching space between longing and belonging.

At first glance, they speak of different terrains. One addresses a homeland, the other a heartbreak. But listen closely, and they begin to echo each other like distant train horns in the night—both are meditations on absence, on the ache of disconnection, and the silent pull of what one has lost or left behind.

1. The Ache of Displacement

In Yeh Jo Des Hai Tera, the voice is gentle yet insistent—a call from the soil itself. The tabla murmurs like footsteps on ancestral land. It is not just a patriotic song; it is a lullaby from a motherland that whispers your name when you have forgotten how to pronounce it. The protagonist is not torn by politics, but by something quieter: the dissonance of living with full stomachs and empty hearts in foreign lands.

Tanhayee, too, is a song of displacement, but internal. It charts the hollow geography left behind when love departs. The city remains, the bed remains, the ceiling fan turns—but the self is unmoored. Loneliness here is not simply solitude; it is a haunting. The song breathes the air of empty rooms, of tea growing cold in unshared cups.

2. Longing as a Compass

Both songs suggest that longing is not weakness, but orientation. In Swades, Mohan Bhargava’s journey is not heroic in the cinematic sense—it is a return to listening. The line “yeh jo des hai tera, swades hai tera, tujhe hai pukara” doesn’t command—it beckons. Longing becomes a guide back to integrity, to roots, to service.

In Tanhayee, the longing is less directional. It loops back on itself. But even in its grief, it refuses to numb out. The pain is real, unhidden. There is dignity in that. To feel this deeply is itself an act of remembering what it means to be human.

3. Silence as Language

What ties these songs most powerfully is the presence of silence—not as absence, but as eloquence. In Swades, it's the quiet between Rahman’s restrained piano notes, or the space in his own voice before it lifts again. In Tanhayee, it’s in the rasp of Sonu Nigam’s breath, the stillness between verses.

Silence is where the truths live. The unspoken recognition that a place can wound you and still be yours. That a person can leave and still shape the architecture of your daydreams.

4. The Gentle Defiance of Feeling

To listen to these songs is to practice a kind of soft rebellion. In a world that prizes speed and forgetfulness, Yeh Jo Des Hai Tera and Tanhayee ask us to pause, to feel, to remember. They say: let your tears trace the lines of what you loved. Let your silence be a form of fidelity.

Not every journey is outward. Some take place within the span of a four-minute song. Some begin with a note, a tremble, a memory. And perhaps that is enough.

Sometimes the way home is not a map, but a melody.

Inspired by "Yeh Din Kyaa Aaye" from Chhoti Si Baat (1976)

There’s a moment in the song "Yeh Din Kyaa Aaye" that feels almost weightless. Mukesh’s voice floats gently over Salil Chowdhury’s orchestration, not rushing, not insisting—just being. The lyrics don’t describe an event so much as a shift in feeling: that something has subtly changed, not in the world, but in the way it is seen. That the same street, the same sunlight, the same hour of the day now feels filled with wonder. Because someone smiled. Because something stirred within. Because the heart, quietly accustomed to undercurrents of unease, chose instead to dwell in a fleeting moment of joy.

I often think about this when life feels heavy. When the noise of the world grows incessant, when demands stack invisibly, when vague heaviness drifts in without name or form. In such moments, the idea of pausing to notice a birdcall, or the steam curling off a cup of tea, can feel absurd. But what if it is not a luxury? What if it is a necessity?

The practice of cherishing ordinary moments is not a retreat from the real world. It is a way of staying present to it. Of refusing to let despair narrate the entire story. When we pause—truly pause—to savor the texture of sunlight on skin or the quiet comfort of a shared silence, we are reclaiming agency. We are saying: This, too, is part of being alive. This, too, deserves my attention.

In "Chhoti Si Baat," the protagonist is not a hero in the conventional sense. He is nervous, hesitant, awkward in his affection. And yet, the film grants him dignity not by transforming him into someone else, but by showing us how he learns to inhabit his own life more fully. How he learns to see beauty not just in another person, but in the very act of being open to love.

I believe there is something radical in this. In choosing softness. In finding meaning not in accomplishments, but in presence. In letting a quiet morning, a song from a simpler time, or a look exchanged on a bus ride home be enough—if only for a moment.

These are not distractions. They are anchors.

They offer a quiet assurance: that amidst the unpredictable and the uncontrollable, there remains a realm we can tend to—our attention. Perhaps the quiet miracle is not in changing the world, but in choosing what to truly see within it.