سرائیکی ڈیجیٹل لائبریری

تیرے دل میں گَر نہ تھا آشوبِ غم کا حوصلہ
تو نے پھر کیوں کی تھی میری غم گُساری ہائے ہائے
مرزا غالب

These lines of Ghalib can be read as a deep reflection on the condition for compassion and also on its failure. In simple words, Ghalib is saying: if your heart did not have the strength to bear the disturbance of sorrow, then why did you try to console me? At one level, this is the complaint of a lover. But at another level, it becomes a serious ethical question about what it means to share another person’s pain.

The most important phrase here is “آشوبِ غم”. Grief is not shown as a soft or quiet feeling. It is a disturbance, an unrest, a storm within the heart. To enter another person’s grief, therefore, is not an easy or decorative act. It demands حوصلہ — courage, endurance, and emotional strength. Ghalib suggests that consolation is meaningful only when one has the inner capacity to remain present before another’s suffering.

This is why the couplet can be read as describing the condition of compassion. Compassion is not just kind speech or polite sympathy. It is not enough to say comforting words. True compassion requires the willingness to be unsettled by another’s sorrow. It asks for sincerity and endurance. To console someone is to accept a responsibility towards their pain. One must be ready not only to approach sorrow, but also to stay with it.

At the same time, the couplet is equally about the failure of compassion and empathy. The listener offered غم گساری, but could not bear the weight of grief. The gesture of care remained incomplete. This is what makes Ghalib’s question so painful. It is not grief alone that wounds him, but the discovery that the offered sympathy was too weak to last. In this way, the couplet becomes a criticism of shallow empathy. It exposes the difference between truly sharing another’s suffering and merely appearing to do so.

We may also connect this with Milan Kundera’s idea of compassion as a kind of co-feeling. Compassion, in this richer sense, is not pity from a safe distance, but the ability to feel with another person. This helps us understand Ghalib more clearly. The failure in the verse is not simply a failure of kindness. It is the failure of co-feeling. The other person may have offered words of comfort, but they could not truly carry the weight of the grief they approached.

Ghalib, therefore, teaches us that compassion has a cost. It requires strength of heart. Without that strength, empathy collapses into performance. One may come near another’s pain, but one cannot truly accompany them. The result is not comfort, but a second wound — the wound of abandoned consolation.

Ashu Lal introduces a further turn:

غم جیڑھا غماں دی پُکار سمجھے
خوشی جیڑھی خوشیاں وِسار ڄاݨے
اشو لال

These lines deepen the discussion by giving priority to grief and compassion before turning to happiness. This order is important. Ashu Lal first says that true sorrow is that which understands the call of sorrows. This means that ethical depth lies in being able to hear and recognise suffering, not only one’s own suffering but the suffering of others as well. Compassion begins in responsiveness. A person becomes fully human when they can hear grief beyond the boundaries of the self.

Only after this does Ashu Lal speak of happiness. True happiness, he says, is the happiness that forgets happiness. This is a striking idea. It means that happiness cannot be secured by continuously seeking it. A person who is always chasing happiness becomes restless, self-absorbed, and trapped within personal desire. Such a person cannot easily hear the call of grief. Real happiness comes indirectly, through a certain forgetfulness — through release from the anxious effort to possess joy.

This gives Ashu Lal’s lines a special depth. He does not treat compassion and happiness as two separate matters. Rather, he suggests that the second depends on the first. One must first understand the call of sorrow; only then can one discover a happiness that is no longer selfish or possessive. Compassion, in this sense, becomes the ground of a truer happiness.

Taken together, these reflections offer a rich moral insight. Ghalib shows that compassion fails when one lacks the courage to bear another’s grief. Ashu Lal shows that compassion deepens when one stops anxiously pursuing personal happiness. In Ghalib, the emphasis falls on the strength needed to stay with sorrow. In Ashu Lal, the emphasis falls on the self-forgetting needed to hear sorrow’s call and thereby become capable of real joy.

Both finally point towards the same truth: genuine compassion begins when the self becomes less protective of its own comfort and more open to the suffering of others. Only such openness can sustain both sympathy and happiness in their deepest form.