Shayari is a form of Urdu poetry which is written or rendered in the form of couplets. I read a lot of shayari mostly from rektha.org.
I came across a biutiful couplet a few days ago. It read
“be-dar- o-deewar sa ek ghar banaya chahiye
koi hum-saaya na ho aur pasbaan na ho”
Build a house without door or windows
Let there be no partner nor watchman
The first thing that struck me was the existentialist philosophy in the couplet. Before we delve into that let’s clarify what existentialism is. In this strand of understanding, man exists without any essence, he is a conscious being who acts and not a corpus of labels, roles or definitions.
Existentialism is against categorization, against stereotyping and carries within its womb the radical idea of emancipating man from his identities. Man is defined by his actions and is responsible for them, for example some person helps the poor is called generous just because of the act alone and not because of his religion, nationality, gender or lineage.
Coming back to the shayari here we see the existentialist idea is used on the concept of house. We define house as one that has doors, windows, inmates etc but the author here loots house of all these definitions. He says that we should make houses with no door and windows, we no inmates or security. He abstracts the idea of a house away from its material moorings. Its vestiges have been struck down and now it is a continuum and can take any meaning it wants to. It can be life itself. Life bereft of meanings, life bereft of causality.
This might sound hopeless but it is not. Existentialism only rejects causality and not correlations. In life you will resonate without knowing the reason, you will fall in love. Love is correlation without causality.
