This is one of only a handful of ghazals from which Faruqi has selected every single divan verse as superior. As Faruqi says, this is one of the most famous verses in Urdu, and honestly awe-inspiring in its tangle of complexities of meaning. Hindi/Urdu students can understand it after only a year or so of study; yet it will repay any amount of thought. Can there be another example of so many meanings attained with so little effort? As Faruqi also observes, the vocabulary is simple and plain (and non-Persianized!) in the extreme. The verse also works as a sort of sophisticated 'mushairah verse', since the first line sets us up to expect an entirely theological theme; the presence of the 'I', and its possible insertion as an omitted subject, don't really occur to us until after we've heard the whole verse. Mahmood Piracha has also pointed out (Sept. 2020) that every single word in the first line appears twice, so that in effect the line consists of six pairs of words. But then with that second line-- what a shock! After hearing it we realize that the first line consists of one 'when-then' and one 'if-then' sentence, for a total of four clauses; the second line contains in its latter half one 'if-then' sentence that comprises two clauses. In any or all of those six clauses, the subject, which is masculine singular in every case, could also be a colloquially-omitted 'I'. And the final is so brilliantly flung down, so rich in possibilities, that it truly boggles the mind. In case the bizarre multiplicity of meanings makes your head spin, there are several key operations that generate them in such profusion. Needless to say, the power of speech and the multivalence of are on display; for more on all this see 21,1 . And the choice-- left entirely up to us-- of whether to add or not add the omitted subject 'I' in each of the possible six places where it might appear, generates implicitly twofold meanings for almost every phrase. And since the lover, God, and the abstract are all masculine singular, all these meanings work: There are thus these six places at which may or may not be conjecturally inserted, with radical effects on the meaning. The only other special information we need is the knowledge that colloquially means something like 'then so what?' or 'then who cares?' (It works so well that Ghalib promptly uses it again in 32,3 .) Is this not a two-line complete portable library of possible existential speculations? That's why I consider it a 'meaning machine' or 'meaning generator'-- because of its radical undecideability. For other examples of such wildly proliferating, hypertrophied 'generator' verses, see in this ghazal 32,3 ; and also 21,1 , 45,3 *, 46,7 *, 101,5 , 202,4 , 214,10 , and the brilliantly simple 230,7 . For another verse with the same apparently sacrilegious overtones, see 230,11 . Along very similar lines, though ultimately less complex, are Mir 's M 481,6 and M 1076,7 . And for Mir's own show of maximum possible permutations, see M 904,1 . My favorite of such 'Ghalibian' Mir verses, however, is M 1469,3 . graphics/ocean.jpg