WHEN MAPLE BECOMES CHINAR

                             

The Metaphysics of Shade: When the Maple Becomes the Chinar

The maple in Paris and the Chinar in Kashmir are two expressions of the same metaphysical fact: that grandeur is not a matter of geography, but of rootedness. The apparent similarities are many. Both trees share a palmate leaf structure, the blades opening like a hand with pointed fingers, veined and noble. Both achieve great height, rising tall with an imposing presence that interrupts the skyline and makes a person look upward. Both are famed for the depth of shade they give. The traveller, weary from sun or from thought, finds under each a sanctuary of cool stillness. In autumn, both put on the same ritual garment. The canopy shifts to a golden hue, then to amber and crimson, and the ground becomes a script of fallen leaves. Winter strips them with equal candour. They stand in the nakedness of a Faquir, all pretence shed, the intricate architecture of branch and bough laid bare against grey skies. Yet this bareness is not death. With spring comes the rebirth of life. Buds break along the limbs, and the trees return to fullness without haste, as if resurrection were simply a matter of course. To sit beneath them, whether on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens or on the grass of Nishat, is to participate in the same ritual of stillness. The city and the valley disappear, and what remains is the vertical covenant between earth and sky. In that moment, distance collapses. Paris is not far from Kashmir, because reverence has no distance. 

                                                 

Maple trees look elegant in Paris because the city is composed to frame them with exacting proportion. Haussmann’s boulevards set a uniform scale of stone and sky that a mature maple meets without excess or absence, while precise "taille douce" pruning reveals the clean architecture of trunk and bough. Planted in rhythmic rows along the Seine and in gardens like the Luxembourg, their palmate leaves create a deliberate order against limestone façades and wrought iron balconies. Paris’s long, measured autumn turns the canopy gold against pale stone and grey skies, intensifying the contrast between organic texture and geometric streets. Tended as civic heirlooms and steeped in the memory of painters, benches, and unhurried afternoons, the maple inherits elegance from the rituals enacted beneath it. The tree does not merely grow in Paris; it performs there, and the city gives it a stage.

The maple is called a "caring elder" in Paris because it behaves like one: rooted in the city’s oldest gardens and boulevards, it spreads a broad canopy that shelters readers, lovers and the weary from summer heat, asking nothing in return. Often a century old, it has witnessed generations change yet returns each spring without haste and releases its leaves each autumn without complaint, modelling a quiet, dependable grace. Found in cemeteries, hospital courtyards and school yards, it keeps vigil where people mourn, heal and learn, while the city’s élagueurs tend it with "taille douce, respecting its form as one respects an elder. Beneath its boughs benches gather memory, and in a city that honours memory, the maple becomes a living archive of small tendernesses. It is not a botanical title but a reputation earned through steadiness, shade, and unhurried watchfulness.

Chinar trees look elegant in Kashmir because the valley itself becomes their pedestal. They rise to immense height, often exceeding 25 metres, yet the vast amphitheatre of mountains keeps them in proportion and makes their scale feel noble rather than overwhelming. Their broad, palmate leaves and massive, mottled trunks are reflected in the still waters of Dal Lake and set against terraced Mughal gardens, where the geometry of Charbagh  channels and fountains gives their wild grandeur a frame. Kashmir’s long, luminous autumn stains the canopy a deep gold and crimson that seems to catch fire against snow-capped peaks and slate skies, while in winter their bare limbs stand like the anatomy of a "Faquir" , stark and ascetic against the valley’s white hush. Planted centuries ago at shrines, courtyards and royal gardens, they are tended as living heritage and carry the weight of poets, saints and gatherings, so their elegance is not only botanical but inherited from the rituals of shade, story and silence that have unfolded beneath them for generations.

The Chinar is still loved as a grandmother in Kashmir because it mothers the landscape with the same unhurried, enveloping care. Planted centuries ago at shrines, courtyards and village greens, these great trees have shaded generations of births, weddings and funerals, becoming living witnesses to family memory. Their massive trunks are mottled like aged hands, their canopy spreads wide enough to gather whole assemblies beneath, and in autumn they shed leaves like stories, gold and crimson, to carpet the earth for children to run through. In winter they stand bare and austere, yet still dignified, teaching endurance; in spring they return to tenderness without being asked. Like a grandmother, the Chinar does not command, it shelters. It keeps silence when grief comes, offers coolness when tempers flare, and marks time so patiently that people measure their own lives against it. To sit under a Chinar iis to feel watched over by something older, wiser, and deeply, quietly familial.

                                            

        ( A Maple leaf decoration in a Paris house )

Artists in Paris and India love the maple and Chinar leaf because both are ready-made emblems of order inside change. The palmate shape gives an immediate geometry: five to seven lobes spread like fingers from a single point, each vein a deliberate line, so the leaf offers structure, rhythm, and balance before a pencil even touches paper. In Paris, the maple leaf becomes shorthand for autumn in the Luxembourg Gardens, its shift from green to gold to russet set against Haussmann stone, and artists use it to capture transience framed by permanence. In India, especially Kashmir, the Chinar leaf carries centuries as the boon motif in papier-mâché, woodcarving, and shawls, a symbol of home, time, and the valley itself. Both leaves perform the same theatre of seasons: tender in spring, dense in summer, incandescent in autumn, and architectural in winter, giving painters a subject that is at once decorative, symbolic, and honest. For an artist, they are nature’s proof that elegance is not decoration added from outside, but structure revealed from within.

The maple and the chinar endure not merely as timber or shade, but as embodiments of a philosophy in which utility is inseparable from meaning. The maple, tapped for syrup, yields sweetness only through wounding, a quiet ethic that nourishment requires sacrifice, and that what is drawn from a living thing must be taken in measure. Its wood, shaped into violins and floors, translates resilience into resonance and daily tread, turning the ethic of service into objects that bear human touch across generations. The chinar, meanwhile, practices a philosophy of witness. Planted at shrines and gardens, it does not produce for market but presides, teaching that a life’s highest use may be to remain, to gather people without command, and to mark time so faithfully that memory itself takes root in its shadow. Where the maple instructs through transformation, the chinar instructs through duration. Together they propose that true usefulness is not extraction but relation: to give without depletion, to shelter without possession, and to stand as proof that care, patience, and presence are also forms of work the world depends upon.

The maple and the  Chinar teach that identity is not exhausted by place. A tree is not French or Kashmiri. It is an upright patience, a witness to centuries, a keeper of silence. To recognise the  Chinar in the maple is to recognise that beauty migrates through likeness, and that the human spirit, when it looks closely, finds its homeland everywhere.

( Avtar Mota )

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.

ALAIN DELON (1935-2024) : THE DILIP KUMAR OF FRENCH CINEMA

                                         

                         

     

  

ALAIN DELON (1935-2024) : THE DILIP KUMAR OF FRENCH CINEMA 

To describe Alain Delon as the “Dilip Kumar of French cinema” is to acknowledge a profound kinship between two titans who, though separated by geography and language, reshaped the very grammar of screen performance in their respective nations. Both men emerged during the 1950s and 1960s, an epoch when post-war cinema was searching for new heroes, and both answered that call not with bombast but with introspection. Dilip Kumar ascended as the “Tragedy King” of Hindi cinema, whilst Delon became the face of European existential cool. Yet their true common ground was a shared revolution in acting. Each rejected the heightened theatricality that had dominated earlier decades, pioneering instead a restrained, psychological realism that trusted the audience to read sorrow in a downturned gaze or defiance in a rigid jawline. They made stillness cinematic. In doing so, they altered the expectations of an entire generation of filmgoers and filmmakers, proving that a leading man’s power could reside in what he withheld rather than what he declared.

The texture of their artistry reveals further symmetry. Delon’s immortal turn as Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s , "Le Samouraï",  is a masterclass in minimalist portraiture , a lone hitman whose rituals and silences articulate an entire philosophy of detachment. One recognises the same emotional terrain in Dilip Kumar’s Devdas and  Mughal-e-Azam,  where the protagonist’s torment is conveyed through measured pauses, subtle tremors of the voice, and eyes that seem to carry centuries of longing. Both actors were blessed with extraordinary physical beauty, yet they refused to be imprisoned by it. Where lesser stars might have traded on looks alone, Delon and Kumar wielded their presence in service of complexity, inhabiting flawed, often tragic men who lingered in the memory precisely because they were not invincible. Their selectivity was legendary. Neither chased volume; both curated legacies. Delon’s collaborations with Visconti in Rocco and His Brothers and Antonioni in  L’Ecliss stand as cornerstones of art cinema, just as Kumar’s work with Bimal Roy and K. Asif became foundational texts for Indian filmmaking. They understood that ubiquity dilutes mystique, and so each film became an event, a deliberate statement rather than a mere credit.

It is fitting, then, that their countries recognised them as national treasures. France honoured Delon with an Honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019, a lifetime tribute to an actor who had become synonymous with Gallic elegance and cinematic daring. India conferred upon Dilip Kumar the Dadasaheb Phalke Award and the Padma Vibhushan, acknowledgements of a career that had elevated the very craft of acting on the subcontinent. But their most enduring legacy cannot be measured in trophies. It lives in influence. Walk through the film schools of Paris or Mumbai and you will find students still studying how Delon held a frame without speaking, or how Kumar could fracture a heart with a single, quiet line. They taught cinema that vulnerability and virility are not opposites, and that a hero’s greatest battles are often fought within. To place them side by side is not to equate their cultures, but to celebrate a rare species of artist: the kind who appears once in a generation, redefines the medium, and leaves behind not just films, but a new way of seeing. France had Alain Delon. India had Dilip Kumar. The screen, in both its languages, was immeasurably enriched by their presence.

 Both rejected the declamatory, theatrical style dominant before them. Both made interiority visible. Audiences and critics lumped them under “method” because they were naturalistic_when naturalism was new. They were something rarer: originals who arrived at realism their own way, and made everyone else catch up.

( Avtar Mota )

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.

A FILM ON ALBERT CAMUS'S NOVEL, 'THE OUTSIDER '

                                            

                                           

                                        

(Algiers, February 1967. Anna Karina and Marcello Mastroianni on the set of "The Stranger", a film by Luchino Visconti based on Albert Camus's novel  .)

L’Étranger (1967), released in English as "The Stranger",  is Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of Albert Camus’s  1942 existential novel. Shot on location in Algiers, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault, a detached French-Algerian who commits an apparently motiveless murder on a beach and faces trial not just for the crime, but for his refusal to perform grief or conform to social expectations. 

Anna Karina plays Marie, his lover. Visconti, known for opulent period dramas like 'The Leopard', took a restrained approach here to match Camus’s spare prose, but critics still found the film too lush and lyrical for the book’s alienated tone. Released five years after Algeria won independence from France, the production was politically charged, since Camus himself was a pied-noir whose views on the war raised controversy. 

Production & Style

Visconti fought hard to get the rights from Camus’ widow. He wanted Alain Delon for Meursault but ended up with Marcello Mastroianni, who had to strip away his usual charismatic,' La Dolce Vita' persona to play someone emotionally blank. Visconti insisted on shooting in Algeria despite the political tension post-independence because Camus’ novel is inseparable from the Algiers light and heat. Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno gave it a bleached, sun-drunk look, harsh midday glare, whitewashed walls, and blinding beaches that physically explain Meursault’s famous “it was the sun” defence.

Key Differences From the Novel

Camus wrote in flat, almost affectless prose to show Meursault’s alienation. Visconti couldn’t replicate that tone visually, so he leaned into sensuality: the textures of sand, water, Marie’s dress, the courtroom sweat. Critics like Pauline Kael argued this made Meursault look sympathetic rather than absurd. Visconti also softened the colonial context. The Arab man Meursault kills is barely named or developed, just like in the book, which later drew postcolonial critiques of both Camus and the film.

Reception & Legacy

The film premiered at Venice in 1967 to mixed reviews. European audiences respected Mastroianni’s restrained performance; he won Best Actor at Venice, but many Camus readers felt it missed the book’s philosophical punch. In the U.S., it barely registered. Over time, it’s become a “beautiful failure”: not the definitive ' Stranger ', but a fascinating document of two things: 1) 1960s art cinema trying to adapt unfilmable literature, and 2) Visconti testing how far his baroque style could be stripped down. 

During filming, Anna Karina and Mastroianni didn’t speak much off-camera. She was fresh off her split with Godard and deep in the French New Wave world; he was Italian cinema royalty. Visconti reportedly liked that distance; it matched Marie and Meursault’s detached relationship. The 'Paris Match' photographer Georges Menager captured them between takes, because the set was swarmed by the press. Everyone wanted to see how Visconti would handle Camus.

The Turkish Version: 'Yabancı'

In Turkey, Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation is known as 'Yabancı', directly translating Camus’s title, ’ L’étranger ’. The film reached Turkish audiences in the early 1970s, a period when existentialist literature was hugely influential amongst Turkish intellectuals and university students. Camus’s novel had already been translated as Yabancı in 1954 by Vedat Gunyol, and the book’s themes of alienation, bureaucracy, and the absurd resonated strongly in a country navigating rapid modernisation and political tension. Consequently, the film was largely screened in arthouse cinemas and university film societies in Istanbul and Ankara, rather than receiving a wide commercial release. Turkish critics at the time praised Marcello Mastroianni’s detached portrayal, arguing that it captured the “ provincial clerk " sensibility that many Turkish readers had projected onto Meursault. 

The Turkish version itself was not dubbed but subtitled, preserving Mastroianni’s original Italian dialogue alongside the French-speaking courtroom scenes. This choice maintained the film’s sense of linguistic and cultural displacement, which mirrored the novel’s colonial Algerian setting. For Turkish viewers, Yabancı became inseparable from Camus’s text in intellectual discourse, often taught in literature departments alongside the novel. Whilst it never achieved mainstream popularity, the film retains a cult status amongst Turkish cinephiles and existentialist circles. To this day, Yabancı is referenced in Turkish criticism as a benchmark for philosophical adaptations, noted for its uncompromising tone and fidelity to Camus’s bleak, sun-drenched vision of the absurd.

Francois Ozon’s Version of ' L’Etranger' (2024)

François Ozon’s black-and-white adaptation of Camus’s 1942 novel, filmed in 2024 with Benjamin Voisin as Meursault, returns L’Étranger to the screen with deliberate austerity. Shooting in monochrome strips Algiers of its postcard heat and instead renders it as a landscape of stark shadows and moral ambiguity, emphasising the novel’s themes of alienation and the absurd. Ozon’s decision to keep the story in its original colonial setting has reignited debate in France over Camus’s portrayal or omission of Algerian identity. 

The film arrived amid renewed scrutiny of how L’Étranger sidelines the Arab victim, who is nameless and voiceless in both book and film, at a time when France is still reckoning with the legacy of the Algerian War of Independence that ended in 1962. By leaning into the novel’s discomfort rather than softening it, Ozon forces contemporary audiences to confront the political silence at the heart of Camus’s existential masterpiece, asking whether Meursault’s detachment can still be read as purely philosophical in a post-colonial context.

.What Camus Had Said About Filming His Novel

Camus died in 1960, 7 years before Visconti’s version, so he never saw it. But he did talk about adaptation. He was sceptical it could be filmed. In 1958 letters, he told producers the book’s power came from style:  the flat, first-person, and present-tense voice. “The cinema will necessarily make Meursault either sympathetic or monstrous,” he wrote. “He is neither.” He feared an actor’s face would add psychology that isn’t in the text.  He rejected American offers. Several Hollywood studios wanted it in the 1950s. Camus said no because they wanted to add a love story, a clear motive, or a redemptive ending. He told Gallimard: “They want to explain Meursault. The point is that he cannot be explained.” His one condition: "If it was ever made, it should not betray the “dry light” of Algeria. He didn’t want romance or tragedy. He wanted the indifference of the world to be physical: heat, light, and sea salt. Visconti actually honoured that part, even if he added too much beauty. Visconti’s film failed by being 'too cinematic', exactly what Camus feared.

While Mastroianni’s performance was praised, the film is now remembered more as a striking visual artefact of 1960s European art cinema than as a definitive take on Camus.

( Avtar Mota )

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.

THE SONG "JAANE TU YA JAANE NA " HAS ENTERED HEARTS IN NORTH AFRICA AND ARAB WORLD

                         

                                                    

"Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na": How a 1973 Kishore Kumar Ballad Became an Unlikely Anthem Across the Arab World and North Africa

"Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na": How a 1973 Kishore Kumar Ballad Became an Unlikely Anthem Across the Arab World and North Africa

Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koyi, 

Yoon hi nahi dil lubhaata koi..  

Jaane tu ya jaane na, 

Maane tu ya maane na.

My Algerian friend in Paris keeps humming this song when I visit his shop. The Coiffure from Tunisia plays it often in his shop. Ibrah, the gym instructor living in our neighbourhood, does a slow step dance on the lilting beats of this song.

In a wedding hall in Algiers, a pianist in a Marrakech riad, a taxi rolling through the 18th arrondissement of Paris at 1 a.m., or a family gathering in Sharjah, the same melody often surfaces. It is not Umm Kulthum, not Fairouz, not Cheb Khaled. Written by Sahir Ludhianavi, it is Kishore Kumar, singing “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” from the 1973 Shashi Kapoor–Sharmila Tagore film," Aa Gale Lag Jaa". 

Fifty-two years on, R.D. Burman’s composition has not faded. It has migrated. From Mumbai to Maghreb, from Cairo to the banlieues of Lyon, the song has taken root in Arab and North African cultural life with a tenacity that few non-Arabic songs can claim. This is the story of how it happened and why it endures.

1. The Bollywood Bridge: 1970s to 1990s

The first conduit was cinema. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, Hindi films were a staple on state television and in cinemas across Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and the Gulf. Shashi Kapoor, with his urbane charm and expressive eyes, was especially beloved. "Aa Gale Lag Jaa" was dubbed into Arabic and French, broadcast repeatedly during Eid and summer holidays, and sold on VHS in every video stall from Casablanca to Damascus.

For a generation, Kishore Kumar’s voice became as familiar as Abdel Halim Hafez’s. The song’s placement in the film: a moment of tender, fated love,  aligned perfectly with Arab cinematic sensibilities. It was not an item-number spectacle; it was Tarab, that Arabic concept of musical ecstasy rooted in longing. The groundwork was laid before satellite TV even existed.

2. Melodic Kinship: Why the Tune Feels Like Home

R.D. Burman’s arrangement is the quiet engine of the song’s crossover. The composition leans on a lilting 6/8 rhythm, soft guitar arpeggios, and a flute motif that mirrors the "Ney"  so central to Arab classical music. The melody moves in minor scales with gentle meend,  slides between notes that recall Andalusi and Malouf traditions.

Kishore Kumar’s delivery avoids ornamentation. He sings straight from the chest, with a conversational ache. To ears raised on Dahmane El Harrachi, Warda, or Sabah Fakhri, that restraint reads as sincerity. The song does not demand to be understood linguistically; it is understood musically. In British parlance, it doesn’t shout, it confides.

3. The Lyrics: Mektoub and Ghorba in Hindi

The lyric, penned by Sahir Ludhianvi, is the other pillar. “Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koyi” or  “You and I share some ancient bond”  translates directly into the Maghrebi and Arab concept of Mektoub: it is written, it is fated. “Yoon hi nahi dil lubhaata koyi” or  “Not just anyone can charm the heart like this”  speaks to a culture where love is rarely casual.

Then comes “Jaane tu ya jaane na, maane tu ya maane na” or  “Whether you know it or not, whether you accept it or not”. In regions shaped by labour migration, student exile, and family separation, that line became a proxy for Ghorba,  the ache of distance. For an Algerian in Nanterre phoning home, or a Lebanese nurse in Dubai missing Beirut, the words fit without translation. The song proclaims the universality of human emotions.

4. Weddings: The Song as Ritual

Walk into a wedding in Oran, Fez, Sfax, or Beirut, and you will likely hear it. Arab and North African weddings prize the slow dance,  the Zéffa,  the moment of hushed reverence. DJs from Paris to Doha keep “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” on the USB stick for precisely that moment. 

Why? Because it does three things at once: it is romantic without being suggestive, it is recognisable across generations, and it carries the weight of fate. The "Pehle ka naata" line gives couples and their parents a narrative: this is not just a match, it is destiny. In hotels from Gammarth to Agadir, resident pianists play it during dinner service for the same reason. It signals elegance, nostalgia, and cultural fluency.

5. The Diaspora Engine: France as Amplifier

France is where the song’s second life accelerated. With over six million citizens of Maghrebi origin, plus sizeable Lebanese, Egyptian and Syrian communities, France became the transmission belt. In the 1990s, children of immigrants discovered their parents’ Kishore Kumar cassettes. By the 2000s, those songs were being burned to CDs for 3ers ceremonies and fer7 parties.

YouTube and Dailymotion did the rest. A clip of Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore in the rain has 40M+ views, with top comments in French, Arabic, and darija: “La chanson de mariage de mes parents”, “Chaque fois que je l’écoute je pense au bled”. TikTok completed the cycle. Today, #jaanetu and #aagalelagjaa tag videos of Franco-Algerian couples in Saint-Denis, Moroccan henna nights in Marseille, and sunset drives along the Corniche in Ain Diab.

The diaspora did not merely preserve the song; it re-exported it. A trend in Lyon reaches Algiers in 48 hours. A wedding in Bobigny sets the playlist for a wedding in Tlemcen next month.

6. The Pan-Arab Effect: Beyond the Maghreb

While the Maghreb–France axis is the strongest, the song’s reach extends east. In Egypt, where Kishore Kumar is still referred to as “Kishore al-hindī”, the track is played on Nile FM’s Bollywood Hour and at Alexandrian weddings. In Lebanon, it surfaces in the piano bars of Hamra. In the Gulf, South Asian and Arab communities overlap. A Pakistani DJ in Dubai will drop it for an Emirati-Emirati couple because the bride’s mother grew up with it on Dubai TV’s Friday Hindi film slot.

The Arabic music tradition of Taqasim improvisation within a melodic frame means listeners are attuned to songs that breathe. “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” breathes. It leaves space. That quality makes it coverable. Oud players in Amman, Rai singers in Oran, and Khaleeji keyboardists in Kuwait have all recorded versions, often blending Hindi and Arabic verses.

7. Technology and Memory: Cassette to TikTok

The song’s journey tracks the technology of memory. 1970s: vinyl and cinema. 1980s: VHS and state TV reruns. 1990s: cassettes in the glovebox of a Peugeot 405. 2000s: burned CDs labelled “Mariage de Samira”. 2010s: YouTube compilations titled “Best of Kishore Kumar, Slowed and  Reverb”. 2020s: TikTok audios tagged “POV: you’re far from home”.

Each format shed listeners who didn’t connect and kept those who did. What remains is an audience that is self-selecting, emotionally invested, and geographically vast.

8. Why It Endures: Seven Core Reasons

1. Melodic Universality: The tune maps onto maqam Bayati and Kurd, scales common in Arab music. No ‘foreign’ notes jar the ear.  

2. Lyrical Fatalism: Mektoub is a shared philosophy. The song articulates it without preaching.  

3. Generational Inheritance: It is a song of parents and grandparents, lending it familial authority. A father who courted his wife to this song expects it at his daughter’s wedding.  

4. Diaspora Utility: It expresses  Ghorba and haneen, homesickness, better than most Arabic pop songs, because it is one step removed. It allows nostalgia without nationalism.  

5. Cinematic Memory: Shashi Kapoor’s softness, Sharmila Tagore’s Sari, the Mumbai rains, these images are coded as ‘romantic’ across the Arab world. The song summons the whole scene.  

6. Ritual Fit: At 3:48, mid-tempo, with a clear build, it is structurally perfect for wedding entrances, first dances, and hotel lobby sets.  

7. Non-Linguistic Emotion: You do not need Hindi to feel it. The Dard in Kishore’s voice, the sigh in the flute, the resolve in the final version in “jaane na”, these are legible anywhere.

A Shared Inheritance

“Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” is no longer merely a Bollywood song. In Arab and North African contexts, it has become a piece of shared cultural furniture, like mint tea or a photo of a 1970s wedding. It belongs to the Algerian father in Drancy who played it on his wedding day in 1984, and to his French-born daughter who chose it for hers in 2026.

The line “Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koyi” turns out to be prophetic. There was some old bond, not between the characters in the film, but between a Bombay studio in 1973 and a living room in Constantine, a taxi in Cairo, a banquet hall in Dubai. Whether the listeners know the literal meaning or not, whether they "maane"  or  "maane na",  the song has already charmed the heart. 

( Avtar Mota )

PS

I heard Mektoub and Ghorba, two words over here, used by immigrants from North Africa. Mektoub is written fate, destiny, whatever was ordained by God.  Ghorba is Exile, the ache of living far from home, homesickness in a foreign land. Mektoub explains why you’re in Ghorba, and Ghorba _ is where you feel Mektoub most.

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.

BOOK REVIEW “KASHMIR CALLING” BY MOHAN KRISHEN DHAR

                                                                                   

BOOK REVIEW

 

“KASHMIR CALLING”

By

Mohan Krishen Dhar

 

Publishers: Sabre & Quill Publishers, New Delhi, India

Year of Publication:  May 2026

(Available on Amazon in India at ……….https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0H2YNF497?s=bazaar)

 

Some books come to us like a visitor from the old city, carrying in the folds of his Pheran not merely facts, dates and arguments, but also the fragrance of dried mint, the murmur of Vitasta, the distant sound of a Wanwun, and the memory of a courtyard where elders once spoke of kings, saints, invaders, poets and gardens with equal ease. Mohan Krishen Dhar’s Kashmir Calling is one such book. It does not pretend to be a tightly argued academic history, nor is it merely a nostalgic exercise written by a man looking back at a lost paradise. It is, instead, a cultural panorama: part history, part civilisational reflection, part travelogue, part literary remembrance, and part repository of folk memory.

The very dedication, to all lovers of Kashmir, its beauty, its songs, and to Somadeva, Lalleshwari and Habba Khatoon, announces the author’s inner geography. Dhar is not interested in Kashmir as a tourist brochure of snow and tulips. His Kashmir is a layered civilisational space: Neolithic settlements, Shaivite metaphysics, Buddhist manuscripts, Central Asian routes, Sanskrit literature, Persianised language, folk songs, Mughal gardens, Dogra rule, political wounds, and oral tales living stubbornly among ordinary people. The book’s strength lies in this large embrace.

The opening essay, tracing Kashmir from the Neolithic age, sets the foundation. Dhar moves from the legend of Satisar and Kashyap Rishi to the archaeological evidence of Burzahom. This is important because Kashmir is too often reduced either to paradise imagery or to contemporary politics. Dhar reminds us that the valley was inhabited, shaped, cultivated and imagined thousands of years before the modern nation-state entered the scene. The movement from myth to excavation is handled with affection. He does not discard legend as superstition, nor does he make archaeology dry. He allows both to stand together, as they often do in the Kashmiri mind.

The chapter on Trika Shaivism is perhaps the intellectual heart of the book. Dhar sees Kashmir Shaivism not as a sectarian possession but as a philosophical gift. He discusses Vasugupta, Somananda, Abhinavagupta, Pratyabhijna, Spanda and Agama traditions with evident reverence. More importantly, he sees Trika as a force that helped create Kashmir’s composite culture. His reading of Lalleshwari and Nund Rishi is deeply Kashmiri in spirit: Shiva is not imprisoned in one community, and inner recognition is greater than external identity. The quoted spirit of Lalla, ‘Do not differentiate between Hindu and Musalman; recognise your own self’, is not used as ornament but as the moral centre of the book.

 Dhar’s treatment of Buddhism adds another layer. He travels imaginatively and physically towards Gilgit-Baltistan, Nanga Parbat and the old corridors of movement between Kashmir, Central Asia, Tibet and China. The chapter is at its best when it shows Kashmir as a receiving and transmitting station of ideas. Buddhism comes, stays, debates, transforms, and is transformed. Dhar makes the valuable point that Kashmir did not merely host Buddhism; it contributed to Buddhist thought, manuscripts, monastic culture and transmission. The ‘Gilgit Manuscripts’ become, in his telling, not dead archival material but lamps discovered in a forgotten chamber.

 His chapter on Central Asian influences broadens the map further. Kashmir, in Dhar’s imagination, is not a closed valley. It breathes through the passes. It touches Tibet, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Ladakh, Gilgit and the great Silk Route memory. Crafts, food, language, religion, trade and political anxieties all move across these corridors. This is one of the book’s most useful reminders: Kashmir’s identity was never made by isolation. Its distinctiveness came from contact, absorption and refinement.

The essay on Nehru’s love affair with Kashmir is written with warmth and conviction. Dhar sees Nehru as a son of the soil in an emotional and ancestral sense. Some readers may find the tone admiring, perhaps even indulgent, but it reveals the author’s generation and sensibility. For Dhar, Nehru is not merely a political actor in the Kashmir dispute; he is a civilisationally attached Kashmiri Pandit, a modern Indian statesman, and a man burdened by history. Whether one agrees with all of Dhar’s conclusions or not, the essay has sincerity.

The chapter on Somadeva’s Katha-Sarit-Sagara is among the most charming sections. Dhar writes of Somadeva not as a remote Sanskrit author but as a Kashmiri genius nourished by Vitasta, climate, ritual, story and memory. Here, the book becomes almost lyrical. The river Vitasta is not just water; it is witness, inspiration and rhythm. Dhar understands that Kashmir’s contribution to literature cannot be measured only through royal chronicles or philosophical treatises. It also lives in stories of transformation, animals, Nagas, swan maidens, thieves, lovers, ascetics and clever women. In this sense, the later short stories included in the book do not feel like an appendix. They complete the author’s idea of Kashmir.

 The sections on Kashmiri and Urdu love lyrics, cultural syncretism, spoken languages and dialects are valuable because they move away from kings and doctrines towards voice. Kashmir has always sung its deepest truths. Habba Khatoon’s pain, Lalla’s Vakhs, Sufi utterance, folk ballads, marriage songs, boatmen’s songs and rural idiom carry history differently from official documents. Dhar knows this. He has the instinct of a collector who fears that modernity may flatten these delicate inheritances. His love for language is visible, though the book would have benefited from more systematic transliteration, translation and source notes in some places.

 The chapter on preserving heritage carries an urgency that feels personal. The author is aware that Kashmir’s temples, gardens, manuscripts, shrines, dialects, crafts, songs and oral tales are vulnerable not merely to neglect but to ideological simplification. Heritage here is not stone alone. It is memory, usage, pronunciation, ritual, seasonal rhythm and inherited courtesy. This is where Dhar’s work becomes a quiet act of resistance. He is saying, in effect: do not reduce Kashmir to violence; do not reduce it to politics; do not reduce it to one community’s grief alone; but also do not erase that grief.

 The photo gallery, as described in the preface, brings another dimension. In such books, photographs are not decorative. They function like windows suddenly opened in a long narrative room. A garden, a shrine, a mountain, a river bend, a ruin — each tells the reader that what is being discussed is not abstraction. Kashmir has a body. It has light. It has texture. It has wounds, visible and invisible.

 The stories at the end — “Saviour of Nishat”, “Bonds”, “Mahadev, the Thief”, “The Crow’s Daughter”, “The White Hen”, “How Parvati Condemned Her Five Attendants to Be Reborn on Earth”, and “Upakosa and Her Four Lovers” — bring the book close to the oral fireside tradition. “Mahadev, the Thief”, especially with its idea of excellence even in a morally dubious craft, carries the flavour of old storytelling where wit, audacity and human weakness mingle. “Saviour of Nishat” connects sacrifice with the beauty of a Mughal garden. These stories restore playfulness after the density of history and philosophy.

The greatest merit of Kashmir Calling is its refusal to let Kashmir be seen through a single window. Dhar gives us Burzahom and Lalla, Ashoka and Abhinavagupta, Nanga Parbat and Nishat, Nehru and Somadeva, Persian script and Sanskrit inheritance, folk tales and geopolitical routes. He writes as one who has read, travelled, remembered and suffered. One may challenge him on details, but one cannot doubt his attachment. This book is best read slowly, not as a textbook but as a conversation with an elderly Kashmiri scholar sitting under a Chinar, pointing now to a ruined temple, now to a forgotten manuscript, now to a song sung by village women, now to a road that once led to Central Asia. His voice may sometimes tremble with pain, sometimes rise in anger, and sometimes soften in wonder. But it remains anchored in love.

Mohan Krishen Dhar has been a distinguished Indian journalist and accomplished writer in both English and Hindi. He served as Bureau Chief and later Diplomatic Editor of The Hindustan Times and also contributed to leading international newspapers, including The New York Times and Le Monde. Widely travelled, he gained broad international experience through visits to many countries across Asia, Europe, Russia and the United States. Born in Kashmir, he was deeply inspired by its natural beauty, rich traditions and cultural heritage. His extensive study of Kashmir’s folklore, literature, festivals and legends resulted in several bestselling Hindi books admired for their lucid prose and vivid style, earning him numerous literary honours.

Dhar writes with the rare authority of a scholar, the sensitivity of a storyteller, and the observational depth of an accomplished journalist. In Kashmir Calling, he weaves history, philosophy, folklore, travel and memory into a richly textured narrative that captures the soul of Kashmir in all its civilisational complexity. His prose moves effortlessly from the lyrical to the erudite, illuminating ancient traditions and living cultures with equal grace. Dhar possesses an exceptional gift for transforming historical and cultural material into vivid, deeply humane storytelling. The result is a work of remarkable intellectual breadth and emotional resonance that lingers long after the final page.

Kashmir Calling is therefore a call not only to Kashmiris but to all who believe that cultures survive through remembrance. It asks us to listen before the songs fade, to read before manuscripts turn brittle, to visit before ruins collapse, and to recognise, in the true Pratyabhijna sense, the Self hidden beneath history’s dust. For lovers of Kashmir, this book is not merely informative; it is an act of remembrance, a recovery of civilisational memory, and a meditation on cultural continuity. Erudite yet deeply humane, it compels the reader to engage with Kashmir not as an abstraction of politics, but as a living reservoir of philosophy, art and historical consciousness. I would strongly and unreservedly recommend this work to scholars, students, and all serious readers seeking to encounter the deeper intellectual and spiritual heritage of Kashmir in its full historical resonance.

 

(Avtar Mota)

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.

Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.

A SMALL TRIBUTE TO BASHIR BADR

                                                                                      

A SMALL TRIBUTE TO BASHIR BADR

 Bashir Badr is no more. He was a poet who did not write poetry from the minarets of abstraction. He wrote it from the dust of courtyards, the ache of bus journeys, the quiet grief of waiting rooms, and the stubborn hope that survives unrequited love. The passing of Bashir Badr marks not merely the departure of a celebrated Urdu poet, but the quiet extinguishing of one of the gentlest lights in the literary consciousness of the Indian subcontinent. Some poets astonish through grandeur, through intellectual complexity, or through the sheer architecture of language. Bashir Badr achieved something far rarer. He entered the emotional bloodstream of ordinary people. His verses travelled without passports through drawing rooms, tea stalls, railway platforms, university corridors, and lonely midnight conversations. He was not a poet confined to anthologies or academic seminars; he was a living presence in memory and speech. His couplets became part of the emotional vocabulary of everyday life.

To speak of Bashir Badr is to speak of intimacy. His poetry never announced itself with the authority of doctrine. It arrived softly, like remembered rain upon an old courtyard, or like the scent of jasmine crossing a summer evening. Indeed, perhaps the most fitting metaphor for his literary presence is fragrance itself. Bashir Badr was a fragrance that wafted freely in the air for all to benefit from. One did not need specialised learning to appreciate him. His poetry belonged equally to the labourer returning home after dusk and to the scholar immersed in literary criticism. Like fragrance, his verse moved invisibly yet unmistakably, entering hearts without ceremony and remaining there long after the moment had passed.

What distinguished him from many contemporaries was his refusal to treat poetry as an exercise in obscurity. Urdu Ghazal tradition, shaped profoundly by Persian aesthetics, has often delighted in elaborate metaphor, ornate diction, and philosophical abstraction. Bashir Badr inherited that tradition yet consciously simplified its language without diminishing its emotional depth. In his hands, the Ghazal shed unnecessary embellishment and returned to human experience. Consider his celebrated line:

“koyi haath bhi na milayega jo gale milogay  tapaak se

Ye Naye Mizaj ka shahar hai zara faaslon se mila karo ”

 The diction is startlingly plain. There is no rhetorical flourish, no lexical extravagance. Yet within this simplicity lies an entire sociology of modern alienation. The couplet warns against excessive openness in a world increasingly governed by suspicion and emotional distance. Bashir Badr understood that the deepest truths often arrive unclothed. Like the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who sought poetry in “the real language of men”, Badr trusted simplicity as an instrument of profundity. Both poets recognised that emotional authenticity possesses greater permanence than decorative sophistication.

Poetry Rooted in Lived Experience

Bashir Badr’s greatness lies not merely in style but in witnessing. His poetry emerges from lived experience rather than literary performance. One senses throughout his work the presence of actual streets, actual separations, and actual evenings endured in silence. He transformed personal memory into collective recognition. When he wrote:

“Ujale apni yaadon ke hamaare saath rehne do,

na jaane kis gali mein zindagi ki shaam ho jaaye”

 He articulated not theatrical melancholy but existential vulnerability. The couplet carries the weariness of a man acquainted with uncertainty. Memories become a source of illumination against the approaching dusk of life. There is tenderness here, but also resignation. Bashir Badr never sentimentalised suffering; he dignified it. This quality invites comparison with Philip Larkin, another poet of urban solitude and quiet emotional fracture. Like Larkin, Bashir Badr possessed an extraordinary sensitivity to loneliness embedded within modern life. Yet where Larkin often descended into scepticism and emotional austerity, Badr preserved warmth. Even in disappointment, his poetry retained faith in tenderness. His verse recognised pain without surrendering to bitterness. One of his most haunting couplets captures the paradox of urban proximity and emotional estrangement:

“issi shahr mein kayi saal se meray kuchh kareebi azeez hain,

unhe meri koyi khabar nahi mujhe unka koyi pata nahin”

 In these lines, Bashir Badr distilled the metropolitan condition with astonishing economy. Human beings inhabit the same city, perhaps even the same neighbourhoods, yet remain existentially absent from one another’s lives. The tragedy of modern civilisation lies not in physical distance but in emotional disconnection. The couplet recalls the emotional landscapes of T. S. Eliot’s urban poetry, particularly the spiritual isolation depicted in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Yet where Eliot’s fragmentation is intellectually dense and symbolically layered, Bashir Badr achieves similar emotional resonance through conversational clarity.

His poetry carried the atmosphere of post-Partition India as well. Though rarely overtly political, his work bears the shadow of displacement, communal fracture, and civilisational anxiety. Bashir Badr belonged to that generation for whom memory itself became a homeland. Yet he refused polemic. Instead, he allowed human feeling to reveal historical wounds indirectly. In this restraint lay his moral strength.

 The Democratisation of the Ghazal

One of Bashir Badr’s most enduring contributions was the democratisation of the Urdu Ghazal. He brought the form closer to everyday speech without vulgarising it. He proved that refinement need not depend upon obscurity. His poetry restored accessibility to a literary tradition that sometimes risked becoming insulated within elite cultural circles. This is why his couplets are remembered orally rather than merely textually. People quote Bashir Badr not because they studied him, but because they lived through him. His verses accompany heartbreaks, departures, reconciliations, and solitary evenings. They survive because they are usable truths.

"Dushmani jam kar karo lekin ye gunjaish rahe,

 Jab kabhi hum dost ho jayein to sharminda na hon".

 In this remarkable couplet, Bashir Badr transforms a simple reflection on enmity into a profound meditation upon the ethical limits of human conduct. The verse suggests that conflict is an unavoidable condition of existence, yet true wisdom lies not in the intensity of opposition but in preserving the moral possibility of reconciliation. Beneath its conversational simplicity resides a deeply philosophical insight: human relationships are transient, mutable, and never wholly fixed within the categories of friend or foe. By urging restraint even in moments of bitterness, the poet affirms a civilisational ideal in which dignity, memory, and compassion outlast anger itself. The couplet, therefore, becomes not merely advice about social behaviour, but a subtle statement on the impermanence of human divisions and the enduring necessity of grace.

Similarly, moving is the couplet:

“Musafir hain hum bhi musafir ho tum bhi,

Kisi mod par phir mulaqat hogi”

 There is remarkable grace in these lines. Life becomes a journey marked by temporary separations and unforeseen reunions. The philosophy is simple yet humane. Bashir Badr’s poetry repeatedly returns to impermanence, but never with despair. Rather, he suggests that transience itself lends beauty to human encounters. In this regard, one might compare him with Thomas Hardy, whose poetry often meditates upon time, separation, and fragile human continuity. Yet Bashir Badr differs in temperament. Hardy’s universe is frequently governed by cosmic indifference, whereas Badr’s retains emotional reciprocity. His poetry whispers consolation even while acknowledging loss.

The Illusion of Proximity: Bashir Badr on Surface-Level Intimacy

The couplet,“Aankhon mein raha dil mein utar kar nahin dekha, Kashti ke musafir ne samandar nahin dekha”, “He remained in the eyes but never descended into the heart; the boat’s traveller never truly saw the ocean” functions as a philosophical indictment of superficial engagement in human relationships. Bashir Badr deploys the maritime metaphor with intellectual precision: the 'Kashti ka musafir',   though physically situated upon the' Samandar', mistakes mere contact for comprehension, content with the visible surface while remaining estranged from the oceanic depths. Psychologically, this mirrors the condition of modern intimacy, wherein individuals may inhabit each other’s immediate perceptual field, the "Aankhon", or eyes,  yet refuse the existential vulnerability required to 'Dil mein utarna', to descend into the heart’s uncharted interiors. The couplet thus exposes a central paradox of closeness: proximity without penetration, presence without perception. It suggests that true knowledge of another demands not spatial nearness but ontological immersion, a willingness to abandon the safety of the boat’s deck for the unfathomable abyss beneath. In this sense, Badr critiques the complacency of relational spectatorship, arguing that to love or understand without plumbing the other’s depth is to remain, philosophically and emotionally, a stranger to the very ocean one claims to traverse.

The Smile as Masquerade: Bashir Badr on the Ethics of Concealment

The couplet, “Ye hansi bhi koyi naqaab hai jahaan chaaha hum ne gira liya / Kabhi unka dard chhupa gaye kabhi apna dard chhupa liya” “This smile too is a kind of mask we wore wherever we pleased / Sometimes we hid their pain, sometimes we hid our own”  articulates a profound philosophical anthropology of emotional performance. Bashir Badr recasts the Hansi, or smile, not as a spontaneous expression of joy but as a deliberate Naqaab, a mask donned with agency and intentionality, thereby destabilising the assumed transparency of human affect. Intellectually, the couplet interrogates the social contract of appearances: the smile becomes an ethical instrument, deployed alternately in altruism and self-preservation. To 'Unka dard chhupa gaye'  reveals a compassionate deception, a Levinasian responsibility for the Other’s vulnerability wherein one’s countenance absorbs another’s sorrow to spare them exposure; conversely, 'Apna dard chhupa liya' exposes the existential burden of the self, where joy is performed to maintain social equilibrium or to evade the ontological weight of one’s own suffering. Thus, Badr situates the human subject within a theatre of affect, where the face is both stage and curtain. The philosophical implication is unsettling: authenticity itself becomes negotiable, and intersubjective life is mediated by calibrated concealments. In this economy of masks, the smile emerges as neither lie nor truth, but as a liminal gesture, a civilising veil that sustains community while quietly archiving the unspoken sorrows of both self and world.

When Worship Becomes a Moral Contradiction

Bashir Badr’s haunting couplet, “Yahaan ek bachche ke ḳhuun se jo likha hua hai usse paḍhein, tera keertan abhipaap hai abhi mera sajda haraam hai”, is not merely a lament over communal riots; it is a profound philosophical interrogation of religion itself. Badr asks us to read what has been written in the blood of a child, for there are moments in history when human suffering becomes a more authentic revelation than any sacred text. The image is deeply unsettling because it inverts the hierarchy upon which organised religion often rests. Instead of scripture judging humanity, humanity’s violated innocence judges scripture and its adherents. The murdered child becomes the ultimate moral philosopher, exposing the abyss between religious profession and ethical conduct.

Badr’s insight resonates with a timeless philosophical truth: no act of worship can compensate for the destruction of human life. Ritual belongs to the realm of symbols; a child’s life belongs to the realm of reality. When symbols are preserved at the cost of reality, religion descends into idolatry of its own forms. In declaring kirtan to be paap and sajda to be haram, the poet is not attacking Hinduism or Islam; rather, he is defending the very essence of both. He reminds us that God cannot be approached through ceremonies stained by indifference to suffering. The ethical claim of the innocent precedes every theological claim. Before one becomes a Hindu or a Muslim, one is confronted by the face of another human being whose vulnerability imposes a moral obligation. The couplet also exposes the tragic paradox of communal violence. Men kill in the name of God and then seek absolution from the very God in whose name they have killed. Such worship is self-contradictory. It assumes that the Divine can be honoured through devotion, even as His creation is desecrated. Yet if God is the source of all life, then every drop of innocent blood constitutes a metaphysical rebellion against Him. The poet, therefore, shifts the locus of the sacred from temple and mosque to the violated body of a child. The true blasphemy is not the neglect of ritual but the abandonment of compassion.

At its deepest level, the couplet articulates a philosophy of moral primacy. Ethics is not a branch of religion; it is the condition that makes religion meaningful. Whenever worship ceases to deepen our humanity, it loses its spiritual legitimacy. The blood of a child becomes the final court of appeal before which all doctrines, identities and rituals must stand trial. In that tribunal, no community can claim innocence, no creed can seek refuge in dogma, and no prayer can escape judgement. The poet’s message is stark and universal: when innocence is sacrificed, religion loses its voice, and silence becomes holier than prayer.

The Tyranny of Appearances: Empty Vessels and Diminished Substance

Bashir Badr's couplet ,"Yahaan libaas ki keemat hai aadmi ki nahin, mujhe gilaas bade de sharaab kam kar de" is indictment of a society that measures worth by outward display rather than inner essence. Philosophically, it exposes the inversion at the heart of social performance: when the Libaas, the garment, the status, the show, is priced higher than the Aadmi, the human being, then life becomes theatre without truth. To ask for a large glass with little wine is to comply with the ritual while rejecting its intoxication, a quiet revolt against substance replaced by spectacle. The bigger vessel preserves dignity in a world that judges by size, yet the reduced wine refuses to let illusion become self-deception. It is a plea for honesty in a market of masks, where one must play along to survive but need not surrender one’s sobriety to the lie.

The Permanence of Simplicity

What ultimately makes Bashir Badr unforgettable is his understanding that poetry need not shout to endure. He recognised that whispers often outlive thunder. In an age increasingly attracted to spectacle and linguistic exhibitionism, he chose quietness. His art rested upon emotional precision rather than intellectual display. He trusted the reader’s heart. This trust explains his extraordinary popularity across generations. Young lovers discovered themselves in him. Elderly readers found companionship in his melancholy. Even those unfamiliar with the technicalities of Urdu prosody recognised the humanity within his lines.  Badr restored dignity to ordinary feelings. He taught that poetry’s highest task is not to impress but to illuminate.

Like Wordsworth, he found profundity in common speech. Like Larkin, he chronicled modern loneliness. Like Hardy, he understood the ache of transience. Yet despite these comparisons, Bashir Badr remains uniquely himself. His poetry carries the fragrance of Indian evenings, of fading letters, of conversations interrupted by silence, of resilience quietly maintained against despair.

He leaves behind no elaborate philosophical system, no difficult intellectual manifesto. Instead, he leaves mirrors. In those mirrors we encounter ourselves: bruised yet hopeful, wounded yet capable of tenderness, lonely yet still searching for connection. Few poets achieve such intimacy with their readers. Fewer still sustain it across decades.

Bashir Badr gave language back to the streets and gave the streets a claim to eternity. He reminded us that literature is not merely an academic enterprise but an emotional inheritance shared by humanity. His couplets will continue to drift through gatherings, classrooms, radio programmes, and solitary recollections long after literary fashions have altered. They will endure because they arise from truths that do not age. The finest poets do not merely write about life; they enlarge our capacity to feel it. Bashir Badr did precisely that. He was a fragrance in the cultural air, gentle, pervasive, restorative, asking for nothing, belonging to everyone. And like all true fragrances, his presence will linger even after the flower itself has disappeared from sight.

Bashir Badr, born in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, on 15 February 1935, was celebrated for his unparalleled command of Urdu literature, especially the Ghazal, through which he captured the delicacy of love, separation, memory, and the quiet sorrows of human existence with remarkable grace. Equally at ease in Hindi and English, he stood as a luminous representative of the subcontinent's shared literary and cultural heritage. His poetry possessed the rare ability to transform ordinary emotions into timeless philosophical reflections, touching hearts across generations and boundaries. Though the poet has departed from this world, his verses continue to breathe in the silence of lonely evenings, in the tenderness of remembrance, and in the unspoken emotions of countless.

 

( Avtar Mota )

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.