रगों में दौड़ते फिरने के हम नहीं क़ायल
जब आँख ही से न टपका तो फिर लहू क्या है
Ragon mein daudte phirne ke hum nahin qaayal
Jab aankh hi se na tapka to phir lahu kya hai
TRANSLATION
I am not impressed by blood merely racing through the veins; if it has not dripped from the eyes, then what kind of blood is it at all?
EXPLANATION
This is one of Ghalib’s most intense images of love and suffering, and it redefines the very meaning of being alive. The first line dismisses ordinary biological life: blood that simply circulates through the veins, doing its mechanical job, earns no admiration from him. “Hum nahin qaayal” — I am not convinced, not a believer in it.
The second line delivers the startling criterion. Real blood, in Ghalib’s reckoning, is the blood that “drips from the eyes” — that is, tears of blood, the classic image of extreme grief and passionate suffering in the ghazal tradition. Blood that has not been wept is hardly worthy of the name.
The conceit reverses our normal values. We think of circulating blood as the sign of life and health. Ghalib says that blood which never turns into the tears of intense feeling is essentially worthless, inert — “what kind of blood is it at all?” To merely survive is nothing; to feel and to suffer is what gives blood, and life, its meaning.
This is the ghazal tradition’s exaltation of passion taken to its logical extreme. A life without the capacity for overwhelming emotion, without being moved to the point of weeping blood, is for Ghalib not really a life. The lover who has truly loved bears the proof in his tears; the unfeeling man’s blood is mere fluid.
The couplet is also a small manifesto about intensity as the measure of existence. It is quoted whenever someone wants to insist that emotion, passion, and the willingness to suffer for what one feels are what separate a meaningful life from mere biological functioning. In two lines, Ghalib turns physiology into philosophy.