Ik Kudi Jida Naam Mohabbat
Batalvi's poem of a girl called Love, who is lost and never found again.
Shiv Kumar Batalvi wrote this poem about a girl named Mohabbat, Love, whose beauty he describes in a series of startling images, and who has gone missing; the poet searches for her everywhere and cannot find her. It is one of the best known poems of the poet who was called the Keats of Punjab, and is read as his lament for a love he lost.
Jagjit Singh sang it, and so did many others; in 2016 it was set to music in the film Udta Punjab and became a hit with a generation born long after Batalvi's death in 1973. Along with Maye Ni Maye, which Batalvi wrote and sang himself, it is the core of his fame.
His poems of pain and separation, birha, made him the most loved Punjabi poet of the twentieth century, and his lines are quoted on gravestones and in wedding speeches alike.
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