hai ik hai
rahta hai ek hi kamre mein
uska rahta hai mein
“The grace of true conversation will come — but for that, at the very least, a poet is essential; a poet is a whole lineage of refinement in himself. A man lives in only one room of the house — his pride occupies all the rest of it.”
है इक है
रहता है एक ही कमरे में
उसका रहता है मकान में
The verse in Devanagari — it carries the authenticity of the original, and every Hindi reader can read it.
The first couplet makes a quiet case for poetry as the keeper of civilised speech: the art of conversing well does not arrive on its own — it needs a poet, and a single poet carries the cultivation of an entire household within him. The second couplet sharpens into a devastating domestic image: a man occupies one room, but his pride spreads through every other room of the house, taking up all the space he himself cannot fill. The metaphor turns ego into a kind of squatter, claiming territory the man never lives in. Read together, the two verses move from what refines us — the disciplined grace of language — to what bloats us — vanity claiming room it will never use.
Notice how much room your pride is taking up in rooms you never even enter — most of what ego defends is space you were never going to use.
The heart of this site stays with Iqbal: explore his couplets → Or browse the whole Other Voices shelf →