Bashir Badr

Born Syed Muhammad Bashir, he took the takhallus 'Badr' — the full moon — and taught Urdu for years at Aligarh Muslim University and then at Meerut College, where he headed the department for nearly two decades. He is the rare serious poet whose lines have escaped literature entirely: his couplets circulate in everyday speech, in film dialogue and across social media, very often with no idea of whose they are.

His life turned on a catastrophe. In the 1987 Meerut communal violence his house, his library and a large body of unpublished manuscript were destroyed, and he left for Bhopal, where he has lived since. The displacement deepened the note of urban loneliness and longing for harmony that runs through his work. In recent years he has lived with dementia — a hard irony for a poet whose most famous line is a plea to let the light of memory stay.

That line — 'ujale apni yadon ke hamare saath rahne do' — is proverbial now, and so is his couplet on keeping room for reconciliation even inside enmity. The appeal is the deceptive ease of it: a hard-won truth delivered in words simple enough to be mistaken for plain speech, which is the most difficult thing a ghazal poet can do.