Qasmi: Kaun kehtha hai kay mauth aayee tho marjaa'oN ga...

[Photo courtesy Urdu Manzil and Syed Saghier Ahmed Jafri]

As we say in Urdu, the man has passed on from the material, ephemeral world. But the poet and his poetry lives on, and helps us live on. Probably one of the most quoted couplets in Urdu about this very matter, one that captures the matter as few have done before, in any cultural and literary tradition, is from Janaab-e-Qasmi himself, who said:

kaun kehtha hai kay mauth aayee tho marjaa'onga
main thoe dharya hoon samandhar main uthar jaa'onga

or

Who says that when death comes, I will die away?
I am a river and into the ocean will I flow away

The Wikipedia article on Qasmi Saahab can be found at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Nadeem_Qasimi

Of course, in this day and age, where a lot of us go to express our grief and share our loss is the Internet. There are now quite a few websites where one can find Urdu poetry and pictures of Qasmi Saahab. Here' a selection:

From Amjad Sheikh, we get:

Poetry of Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi Marhoom in his own voice. including his famous poem Pathar:

http://www.urdulife.com/mushaira/poet.cgi?anq_ahmed_nadeem_qasmi

And in Unicode (meaning it is written in Urdu and easier to read, and you can make it bigger, etc. like you would English text), we have:

http://tinyurl.com/rsyob

You can also read selected poetry by Qasmi Shaib at

http://www.urdulife.com/forum/index.php?showforum=65

On a personal note, I just noticed a post on the BBC Urdu blog from Musaddaq Sanwal, someone I knew, as they say, in another life:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/urdu/2006/07/post_12.html

And from the UAE, Syed Saghier Ahmed Jafri Saahab and Urdu Manzil send the picture above and the following links for poetry:

http://www.urdumanzil.com/adab_nama/allmi_mushaira/index.html
http://www.urdumanzil.com/adab_nama/qasmivisit/index.html

and photographs:

http://www.urdumanzil.com/adab_nama/pics/photo-10.html
http://www.urdumanzil.com/adab_nama/pics/photo-14.html

The post on Pakistaniat: All Things Pakistancan be found at:

http://pakistaniat.wordpress.com/2006/07/11/ahmed-nadeem-qasmi/

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