Abbas Qamar
An emerging young voice of the Urdu ghazal, with a wry, conversational turn and a fondness for the radif refrain — a poet of the new mushaira and online generation.
Abbas Qamar (the archives record his name as Qamar Abbas) was born in 1994 in Jaunpur, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and is based in Delhi, where he took a master's in International Relations at Jamia Millia Islamia. He began publishing around 2017 and is catalogued as one of the younger voices 'representing youth' in the form — his presence is heavily on video and the live mushaira rather than the printed collection.
He is, fittingly for a poet still early in his arc, lightly documented; what is verifiable is the birth year, the Jaunpur origin and the Delhi education, and the wry, plain-spoken irony the couplet on this shelf shows. (Note that a separate poet, Qamar Abbas Qamar, of similar age and name, exists too — we mean the Jaunpur-born one here.)
aap ka me'yar dekha kitne me'yari hain aap …
“Thinking the one before you is lightweight, you carry yourself as weighty — I have seen your "standard"; how very high-standard you are. You will not so much as sigh against His Majesty — you are used to the court; you are a courtier.”
jo bik nahin raha tha use daan kar diya …
“I made the bargaining for life easy — whatever would not sell, I simply gave away as charity. We could not enjoy the whole ghazal at all — the opening couplet had so utterly astonished us.”
ek tasvir purani si hansa karti hai
“There is doomsday-deep gloom in my room — yet an old photograph keeps making me laugh.”
dar ne insan ko diwana bana rakkha hai
“It is the fear of hell that invented prostration — fear has made a madman of the human being.”
is dasht mein bas aabla-pai hai roiye
“If you are happy, then you are no traveller of this world — in this wilderness there is only blistered feet; so weep.”
khud ko maazi ka nihan-khana bana rakkha hai
“I have made myself a stranger to the present — and turned myself into a hidden vault of the past.”
itne sunae sher ki diwan kar diya
“If in the gathering I came upon one line of beauty, I recited so many couplets that it became a whole collection.”
Browse every poet on the Other Voices shelf → The heart of this site stays with Iqbal: explore his couplets →