Nasir Kazmi

"Ever centred in my thoughts, I resemble you alot. O, partner of the yesteryear, This year, I'm alone, alas! All day long in your lane, I, the hurtful stones amass. Who can look me in the face? I'm but your looking glass. You are the bustling street of life, I, the lonesome jungle path. The coming season shall weep for me, I'm the season's dying draught. In my wave lies my bane, I'm a river, athirst withal."

"A responsibility of great art is to capture the zeitgeist in words with such expertise that you cannot understand that period without ignoring it. In the West, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ is the best example of this. If anyone made migration a civilizational experience in Urdu poetry, it was no one except Kazmi. Surprisingly, an acclaimed scholar like Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, ignoring this aspect, spoke his mind by labelling Nasir as merely a poet of the tragic tone of love and passion. The nostalgia of Nasir is not personal, but civilisational. Sample a few verses of a ghazal from his diwan (collection) and Barg-e-Nai (‘Melody of the Flute’). Does this attitude feel like it springs from the failure of personal love."