Today I turn thirty eight and I choose to remain unfinished!

میں رہا عمر بھر جدا خود سے
یاد میں خود کو عمر بھر آیا

In life of every man comes a stage when the only respite from the mundane lies in questions. Answers begin to feel like veils: thin and deceptive, or endless loops, that drain life of its existence and urgency.. This is a stage when man becomes a philosopher- he learns to romanticise his questions and finds quiet comfort in knowing that most of them will remain unanswered, forever.

ایک ہی حادثہ تو ہے اور وہ یہ کہ آج تک
بات نہیں کہی گئی بات نہیں سنی گئی

Such man draws inwards. He descends into the abyss of his own existence, not for answers but for questions. He becomes self aware of the fact that life is a casualty of poems left unspoken and songs left unheard. Life is a casualty of what was not lived—and equally of what was. In the end, life is only a casualty of life.

جو گزاری نہ جا سکی ہم سے
ہم نے وہ زندگی گزاری ہے

In the quietude of this casualty lies a peculiar torment- the violence of becoming conscious of one’s own consciousness. For such a man the mere act of seeing oneself becomes an act of rebellion. This violence of self awareness is a sharp instrument that dwells in raw bleeding wounds of existence itself.

میں بھی بہت عجیب ہوں اتنا عجیب ہوں کہ بس
خود کو تباہ کر لیا اور ملال بھی نہیں

The torment of self awareness doesn’t manifest as an external brutality, it stabs into the internal with the shurikens of recognition. The mirrors don’t reveal his face but chasms behind his eyes. Man becomes an observer and observed, questioner and questioned, he becomes the plaintiff, the convict, the witness, the lawyer and the judge; his self splinters.
He starts dwelling in the mirror.

اپنے اندر ہنستا ہوں میں اور بہت شرماتا ہوں
خون بھی تھوکا سچ مچ تھوکا اور یہ سب چالاکی تھی

Majnoon is a madman who wanders the stretches of wilderness in his frenzied search for truth. Man abandons self. Such man’s wilderness is not the desert but his interiority. To recognise oneself is to become homeless, even within one’s own skin.

یہ مجھے چین کیوں نہیں پڑتا
ایک ہی شخص تھا جہان میں کیا

This homeless man writes with a coherence of genuine disorientation, not the incoherent orientation of a poet. He scribbles with the authentic confusion of someone who looked too deeply into the mirror and can no longer distinguish between the image and void behind it.

مستقل بولتا ہی رہتا ہوں
کتنا خاموش ہوں میں اندر سے

Sucked into the unbearable abyss of clarity, he tries to systematize his pain. He tries to find a scaffoldings for his descent: Dostevesky, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Freud… He makes desperate attempts to reduce the ineffable to the sayable and in that desperate attempt something deeper seems to be lost.
However, for him there is no aesthetization of suffering, no comfort in verses, no redemptive arc. The philosophies don’t lead to enlightenment but reinforce visions of one’s entrapment.

حاصل کن ہے یہ جہان خراب
یہی ممکن تھا اتنی عجلت میں

From desperation to depression to death, man passes through a succession of denials, each more refined than the last. He begins to measure life not by what it offers, but by what it withholds; not by presence, but by absence. Meaning is no longer encountered in fullness, but inferred from gaps and silences.

اک عجب حال ہے کہ اب اس کو
یاد کرنا بھی بے وفائی ہے

And yet, is this not also a moment of rare greatness? A threshold where the senses exhaust themselves and imagination is forced to take over. The man, stripped of certainty, glimpses a form of greatness not in answers, but in the courage to dwell where nothing is given and everything must be conceived?

اب نہیں کوئی بات خطرے کی
اب سبھی کو سبھی سے خطرہ ہے

Greatness lies not in understanding but in exhaustion. The intimacy with one’s own confusion is respite of an elevated man. The meaning to him does not arrive as a revelation but as a residue: faint, haphazard and stubbornly alive. And in this failure for closure, one is closest to truth- not as an answer but as a wound that refuses to heal.

زندگی کیا ہے اک کہانی ہے
یہ کہانی نہیں سنانی ہے

The violence of self awareness is not because life lacks meaning, but because man becomes aware of the lack.

اتنا خالی تھا اندروں میرا
کچھ دنوں تو خدا رہا مجھ میں

At 38, I remain unfinished and strangely at peace with that.

ٹھیک ہے خود کو ہم بدلتے ہیں
شکریہ مشورت کا چلتے ہیں

(The poetry belongs to another frenzied madman who stood unflinching before his own abyss: Jaun Elia)