Mirza Ghalib, was a celebrated poet who lived in Delhi in the 19th century Delhi. He was as famous for his wit and defiance of conventions as he was for his verses. He mostly wrote ghazals—a form of lyric poetry built of rhyming couplets, each standing alone yet connected – usually exploring themes of love, philosophy, and existence. Ghalib lived at a tumultuous time, the waning of the Mughal empire and the upheavals of first battle of independence in1857, and the rise of the British empire. His poetry captured both the grandeur and decay of a changing world.

Growing up in India, Ghalib’s poetry was like the air you breathe – always there but rarely noticed. His ghazals would play at cultural events, on radio shows, and on TV and was pretty much the ambient soundtrack you take for granted. Moreover, in my youthful arrogance, I dismissed ghazals as merely romantic poetry, too traditional and too sentimental for my “modern” tastes.

I re-discovered Ghalib through Professor Amit Basole’s incredible podcast series on Azim Premji Radio back in 2023, and I’ve been obsessed ever since. What struck me about these episodes was how accessible they made Ghalib – through Basole’s light touch and careful exposition, and his voice became a friendly companion during my daily walks with Omi, my dog. I binged the series and then I have been playing Ghalib pretty much non-stop on Spotify since then.

So what changed? Let me explain using one of his poems (a ghazal) called “Dil-e-nadaan.” Growing up, I instinctively dismissed it as just another romantic ghazal. I mean, it does start with “dil” (heart), so teenage me filed it away as another love poem. But years later, with Amit in my ears explaining Ghalib to me, I realized how wrong I was.

The genius of this ghazal, and particularly the couplet “Jab ke tujh bin nahin koi maujud / Phir ye hungama, ae khuda, kya hai” (“When nothing exists except You / Then what is all this commotion, O God?”), hit hard. Clearly this was not just about love and romance – it was an existential scream into the void. Ghalib is basically asking: if there’s only You (and this ‘You’ is brilliantly ambiguous – a lover? God? the self?), then what’s all this chaos around us? Why this elaborate drama of existence? The raw frustration in “hungama” (commotion) is what gets me – it’s almost sarcastic, like Ghalib is calling out the absurdity of all human struggle and desire.

And I loved it.

But something still bothered me. While I deeply appreciated the traditional renditions of his ghazals, with their melodious tunes and classical arrangements, I felt they were missing something essential about who Ghalib and his poetry. In these arrangements you lost the fact that Ghalib was a masterful satirist, a keen observer of human folly, and someone who wasn’t afraid to call out hypocrisy with a sharp tongue and sharper wit. There’s an edge to his poetry that often gets smoothed over in the gentle, flowing traditional presentations. No surprise that I considered him just a romantic poet singing of love and loss.

Even in this ghazal – on the surface, it’s a beautiful meditation on pain and longing. But listen closer. There’s frustration there. Anger. Dark humor. When he asks “hum hain mushtaq aur vo bezaar” (“I am eager while they remain indifferent”)—the “they” of course is deliciously ambiguous, you can hear the bite in his words. When he mocks those who “don’t even know what loyalty is,” there’s genuine contempt there, beyond the alliterative flourish.

This got me thinking – what would Ghalib sound like if he were writing today? Would he be confined to the classical form, or would he find his voice in more contemporary genres that better capture his complexity? I decided to experiment with this idea, taking this particular ghazal and reimagining it in two modern forms: heavy metal and hip-hop—using, what else, the AI-based music generation site, Suno.com.

Why these genres? Because both, at their best, excel at expressing exactly what I find in Ghalib’s work – raw emotion, social critique, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths.

I shared the, heavy metal version with students in my creativity class – on a session devoted to the understanding the role of abstraction in creativity—and how abstraction allows us to get to the essence of a concept—maybe. And I see these experiments as trying to find new ways to connect with Ghalib’s essence. In just two lines of that central couplet, he manages to question everything – existence, God, love, reality itself – while maintaining this razor-sharp edge of dark humor. This is what makes Ghalib not just a poet of romance, but a philosopher who uses love’s language to probe the deepest questions of existence.

Here is the metal version, and I feel that the heavy guitars and aggressive vocals capture that sense of raging against the divine, that existential questioning that runs through Ghalib’s work.

I find the rap version less successful… maybe I didn’t know how the write the right prompt – but the goal was to capture Ghalib’s wordplay and social commentary. I mean the line “Hum ko un se wafa ki hai ummed / Jo nahin jaante wafa kya hai” becomes a straight-up diss track aimed at fake friends and false loyalties

Speaking of essence and abstraction, here’s a slide I shared with my students that day – a couplet where Ghalib questions the very nature of perception and existence. When he asks how seeing itself comes to be, when observer and observed are one, he captures perfectly that tension between unity and multiplicity that lies at the heart of both philosophical inquiry and creative thinking. In just two lines, he demonstrates why his poetry remains vitally relevant to discussions of abstraction and essence today.