Muqtida Hasan Nida Fazli popularly known as Nida Fazli, is a popular Indian Urdu poet. Born on 12th October 1938, in Delhi, India into a Kashmiri family, he attended school in Gwalior. His father was an Urdu poet as well. During the partition of India, his parents migrated to Pakistan, but Fazli decided to stay in India.

He wrote essays critical of contemporary poets of the sixties in his book Mulaqatein which outraged poets including Sahir Ludhianvi, Ali Sardar Jafri and Kaifi Azmi. As a result, he was boycotted in some poetic sessions.

Nida Fazli is a poet of various moods and to him the creative sentiment and inner urge are the sources of poetry.  He published his first collection of Urdu poetry in 1969. Primary themes which run through his poetry are contradictions in life, the search for purpose, nuances of human relationships, differences between practice and preaching, and the search for that which is lost.

He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1998 and was awared the Padma Shri by Government of India in 2013.

Here is one of his famous couplets from the popular song ‘Hoshwalon ko khabar kya..” from the movie Sarfarosh, sung by Jagjit Singh:

Hum labon se keh naa paaye, unse haal-e-dil kabhi,
Aur wo samjhe nahin, ye khamoshi kya cheez hai”

I was not able to express the state of my heart to her,
And she failed to understand what my silences meant.

And here is another gem written by him and sung by Jagjit Singh:

har taraf har jagah beshumaar aadami
phir bhi tanhaaiyo ka shikaar aadami

subah se shaam tak bojh dhotaa hua
apani hi laash ka khud mazaar aadami

roz jitaa hua roz marataa hua
har nayi din nayaa itazaar aadami

har taraf bhaagate daudate raaste
har taraf aadami ka shikaar aadami

zindagi ka muqaddar safar dar safar
aakhiri saans tak beqaraar aadami

English translation below:

Everywhere you see, innumerable people
Yet, every person is a victim of loneliness

From morning to evening, he carries such a burden
Man, he makes a grave for his own corpse

Every day he lives, every day he dies
Every new day is a new wait

In every direction, roads for him to run
Every direction, man is chasing man

The fate of life is to take journeys upon journeys
Till his dying breath, man stays restless

The song in Jagjit Singh’s mellifluous voice is here: