3 verses · ~1 min
चादर-सी ओढ़ कर ये छायाएँ तुम कहाँ चले यात्री, पथ तो है बाएँ।
धूल पड़ गई है पत्तों पर डालों लटकी किरणें छोटे-छोटे पौधों को चर रहे बाग में हिरणें, दोनों हाथ बुढ़ापे के थर-थर काँपे सब ओर किन्तु आँसुओं का होता है कितना पागल ज़ोर- बढ़ आते हैं, चढ़ आते हैं, गड़े हुए हों जैसे उनसे बातें कर पाता हूँ कि मैं कुछ जैसे-तैसे। पर्वत की घाटी के पीछे लुका-छिपी का खेल खेल रही है वायु शीश पर सारी दनिया झेल।
छोटे-छोटे खरगोशों से उठा-उठा सिर बादल किसको पल-पल झांक रहे हैं आसमान के पागल? ये कि पवन पर, पवन कि इन पर, फेंक नज़र की डोरी खींच रहे हैं किसका मन ये दोनों चोरी-चोरी? फैल गया है पर्वत-शिखरों तक बसन्त मनमाना, पत्ती, कली, फूल, डालों में दीख रहा मस्ताना।
इति
The Poet
माखनलाल चतुर्वेदी
Makhanlal Chaturvedi
1889 · 1968
There is a poem that lives at the absolute center of the Indian literary imagination of sacrifice a poem in which a flower, offered for worship, instead asks to be pressed into the wreath of a martyr, to fall upon a brave man's chest as he marches into the cannon's mouth. That poem is Pushp Ki Abhilasha The Flower's Longing and its author, Makhanlal Chaturvedi, composed it with the hand of a man who had already offered himself in exactly the same spirit. He was imprisoned multiple times by British colonial authorities for his journalism and his poetry. He was the editor of Prabha, one of the luminous literary political journals of the independence era. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi's very first prize in 1955, and the Padma Bhushan followed. But what no institutional recognition can fully capture is the texture of his moral life the extraordinary combination of burning patriotic fire and absolute personal humility, a man who wrote about martyrdom while quietly being available for it himself. Born in Babai in 1889, he lived to see the independence he had helped dream into existence, and then he wrote on for two decades more, finding in a free India new obligations for the literary conscience. He is the poet of pure sacrifice not sacrifice celebrated from a distance, but sacrifice inhabited, practiced, and offered without expectation of return.
Paired Painting
Romantic Landscape
This intimate view captures the soulful essence of nature as perceived by the masters of the Düsseldorf school. Johann Wilhelm Schirmer possessed a profound ability to translate the quiet hum of the wilderness into paint, inviting the viewer to step onto the path and lose themselves in the undulating mountains. It is a work of deep contemplation, reflecting the Romantic era's yearning for a divine connection with the untamed earth. The gentle light filtering through the foliage suggests a moment of stillness, a breath caught in time where the spirit of the artist and the viewer find common ground amidst the trees.
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