I ritually read him every year, every month, every week, picking up this volume with shaking hands, leafing through it abruptly, settling on a poem at random, scanning the words, which devastate me without fail every time I set my eyes on them. He's most certainly and most undoubtedly the best modern poet Urdu has produced in Pakistan, in India and elsewhere. His word is humanity in its most pristine it teaches you the highest form of existence, all in a single volume of his collected works, Nuskha Haye Wafa - the manuscript of faith, the treatise of love, a compendium of all that makes one a human being.įaiz is my all time favourite poet. You just accept it, like a penitent, kneeling, head bowed, with a bowl of palms spread to receive the elixir of his poetry. I know I'm waxing poetic but how can one praise Faiz if not by poetry itself? The fact is, there are no words to enumerate the gifts Fiaz's words bestow on you. You just accept it, like a penitent, kneeling, head bowed, with a bowl of palms Reading Faiz is akin to discovering a new existence such that once you discover it, the life you had hitherto known feels utterly without meaning, without purpose, without substance, as if none of it had mattered before, as though you have been born just now. Reading Faiz is akin to discovering a new existence such that once you discover it, the life you had hitherto known feels utterly without meaning, without purpose, without substance, as if none of it had mattered before, as though you have been born just now.