To a Young Man

Ek Nau-jawan ke Nam is a poem written as a personal address. An older speaker, recognisably Iqbal himself, turns to a particular young man and tells him plainly what he sees. The young man is surrounded by fine things, and the poem is the older man's argument that those fine things are not a sign of success but a quiet danger.

It belongs to Bal-e-Jibril, published in 1935, the collection in which Iqbal speaks most often to the young, because he believed the future of any community is decided by what its youth choose to become. This poem narrows that concern to a single conversation, which gives it the force of something said to one person's face.

The poem opens with the room itself. Your sofas are European, the speaker says, your carpets are Persian; the comfort is imported, the taste is borrowed. From that image he moves to his real grief: the soft, idle ease of the young makes him weep. The structure is a steady progress from observation to diagnosis to a final, lifting demand.

The argument is about where greatness actually comes from. Grand buildings and the trappings of kingship, the speaker says, are worth nothing if the person inside them lacks inner force, the courage Iqbal names with the figure of Ali and the serene self-sufficiency he names with the figure of Salman. Do not look for your worth, he warns, in the glitter of the modern age; the true ascent of a life is found in needing less, not in owning more.

Then the poem turns, and its hardest demand is also its most hopeful. Despair, the speaker says, is itself a kind of decay, a loss of knowledge and vision; never let yourself fall into it. When the eagle's spirit wakes in the young, they see their destination in the open sky. The closing couplet is the one every reader remembers: your home is not the palace dome, you are a falcon, so make your dwelling among the mountain crags.

Ek Nau-jawan ke Nam endures because the conversation it stages never goes out of date. Every generation produces young people cushioned by comfort and quietly unsure why they feel small. Iqbal's answer crosses every border: worth is built by effort and self-mastery, and the antidote to a soft life is to choose, deliberately, the harder and higher ground.