हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले
बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान लेकिन फिर भी कम निकले
Hazaaron khwahishein aisi ke har khwahish pe dam nikle
Bahut nikle mere armaan lekin phir bhi kam nikle
TRANSLATION
A thousand desires, each one so intense it could take my life. Many of my longings were fulfilled, yet even so, they felt too few.
EXPLANATION
This is arguably the single most quoted opening couplet (matla) in all of Urdu poetry, and it distils Ghalib’s worldview into two lines. The first line presents desire not as something gentle but as something fatal — each wish is so overwhelming that “dam nikle,” literally “the breath leaves,” meaning it could kill him. Desire here is not decoration; it is a force strong enough to consume a person entirely.
The second line introduces the tragic arithmetic of human longing. Ghalib admits that many of his desires were in fact fulfilled — “bahut nikle mere armaan.” This is important: he is not complaining about a life of total deprivation. The devastation lies in the next phrase, “phir bhi kam nikle,” even so they were too few. No amount of fulfillment ever satisfies; the appetite always outruns the harvest.
What makes the couplet philosophically rich is that it refuses self-pity. A lesser poet would have written about unfulfilled dreams. Ghalib writes about fulfilled ones and finds them insufficient, which is a far darker and more honest observation about the human condition. The problem is not the world’s stinginess but the bottomless nature of human wanting itself.
There is also a beautiful play between “dam nikle” (the breath leaving, death) and the idea of desires “nikalna” (emerging, being fulfilled). The same verb of “coming out” governs both death and fulfillment, quietly suggesting that to fully satisfy a desire and to die are strangely similar — both are an ending.
For a reader, the couplet works on every level at once: as a romantic lament, as autobiography (Ghalib’s own life of frustrated ambition and financial struggle), and as a universal statement about why human beings are never at peace. That layering is exactly why it has survived nearly two centuries and is recited as easily by a heartbroken teenager as by a philosopher.