Earth is Round...

when you tuned back and went away from me
i only blessed you,
"if you don't turn back ever again in your life
you will find your dreams waiting for you near horizon"

and i smiled saying to myself,
"Earth is round!"

उंगलियां फिगार अपनी...

Gtalk has given facility to set status messages and people use it really innovatively. That day I saw one status message in my friend list...

उंगलियां फिगार अपनी, खामाखूं चकां अपना

Now what does that mean? Only known words were “उंगलिया”, “अपनी” and “अपना”.Everything else was cryptic…but catchy. “उंगलियां फिगार अपनी”!!! “उंगलिया” means fingers; I recalled 5^th std Hindi but “फिगार”??? I liked the pronunciation of the word…felt like something really deep…painful…I came to know that this line is by Ghalib! Then obviously the unknown words must be Farasi. I searched through Diwan-e-Ghalib and I got the meanings of encrypted words. फिगार= wounded!

Huh! Urdu unnecessarily decorates Hindi, and Farasi decorates Urdu. The whole verse was

दर्द-ए-दिल लिखूं कब तक, जाउं उनको बतलादूं

उंगलियां फिगार अपनी, खामाखूं चकां अपना

Aah! For how long I should write about feelings of my heart, now I can’t… my fingers are wounded. Now I think I should tell her directly!

“दर्द-ए-दिल लिखूं कब तक… उंगलियां फिगार अपनी!” these two lines permanently captured my mind. Poet wants to convey his feeling to her. He writes them down everyday, may be in his Shaayari. And what are those feelings, just effect of time he spent with her. Sweet memories! That’s what he is writing down in his poetry…

Suddenly one line struck my mind…

हाल या बोटांचा नको विचारु का असा?

लिहीत होतो गीत जे मी आठवणींनी माखले!

Hussh! I felt like relieved from that haunted verse, for so long it was distilling in my mind! But it was not so easy that day. I started reading whole ghazal-

जिक्र उस परीवश का और फिर बयां अपना

बन गया रकीब आखिर था जो राजदां अपना

Only unknown word in the verse was परीवश, but not a big problem. Meaning was available over the net.

Poet may be in his friend circle. Somebody must have asked “अबे वो *** क्या करती है आजकल..?”.... Hmmm that’s what we call “जिक्र उस परीवश का....” People knowingly ask such questions. And now is the time to admit:we are not together now…“बन गया रकीब आखिर था जो राजदां अपना”…

उल्लेख झाला तिचा अन ह्र्दय माझे बोलले

आपला म्हणले जयाला त्यानेच आता तोडले

Oh wow! I have actually translated two verses of Ghalib! I started enjoying it! And it was really great experience when our Machine Translation assignment was due after some days. Lets try out some more… I thought.

मंजर इक बुलंदी पर और हम बना सकते

अर्शसे इधर होता काशके मकां अपना

This is simple knowing अर्श=heaven. Poets always say “her home is better than heaven” (I would say “isn’t it obvious?!”). The exact meaning of above verse is I would have reached to even more height if my place is in your home (or heart…being more poetic) than in heaven. Now, only additional assumption I made while translating this verse is Poet is already in heaven. Which may be implicit from the effect of “काश...” And I brought in God who is stopping the poet going to her home from heaven. And I re-expressed the verse by the construction if God allowed me to come to you from heaven then I would have been in better position!

पोहोचलो असतो आम्ही याहुनही उंचीवरी

स्वर्गातूनी त्याने आम्हा जर दारात तुझीया धाडले

Hmmm! This re-expression is analogous to alignment model of machine translation. Suddenly I remembered my assignment! But Ghalib’s verses were 100 times better than “Goa is premier beach vacation destination” (this was the example line used by our Natural Language Processing Prof to explain machine translation).

Ok. Next verse.

दे वह इस कदर जिल्लत हम हसींमे टालेंगे

बार-ए-आश्ना निकला उनका पास्बां अपना

Here I remembered Meer, a poet almost a century before Ghalib. “जाने न जाने गुल ही न जाने बाग तो सारा जाने है”. The heroines in Urdu poetry are all the same. They don’t care about poets feelings. And they insult (जिल्लत) the poet big time, and even poets are all the same. They say “don’t be so ignorant …its open secret now!” And moreover whom so ever if he/she knows about poet’s feeling about her, poet brings him/her on his side, may be to convince her. The word to word translation of above verse goes like “I accept all her insults; I am happy that her gatekeeper(पास्बां) is on my side”. While translating this, I took reference from Meer’s verse. “पत्ता पत्ता बुटा बुटा हाल हमारा जाने है। जाने न जाने गुल ही न जाने बाग तो सारा जाने है॥ “. “Every tree and every bush knows my feelings, even though the rose (herself) is ignorant about it I m happy that whole garden knows it (whole garden is aware of my feelings…is on my side)”. Taking help from Meer my translation model translated the verse as:

वल्गनांना झेलताना मनी समाधान हेच की

सोडले ज्याला फुलाने, काट्याने आपले मानले

Two more to go. Once the parameter was estimated my translation model was translating verses without much problem. (Parameters here were meter of poem and rhyming word…surprisingly meter is analogous to length of target sentence: parameter used by IBM model J )

ता करे ना गम्माजी कर लिया है दुश्मनको

दोस्तकी शिकायतमे हमने हमजबां अपना

This happens in every bollywood love story. Villain tells fake stories about hero to heroin. Poet wants to stay safe from these villains. So he better makes them friends. But its not willingly. So he explains why he made these kind of dirty people his friends: only so that they wont tell her something wrong about him.

पटाईत आहेत सारे कान भरण्यामध्ये इथे

त्या भीतीने कुणाकुणाला मित्र करावे लागले

Finally I reached the last verse: the makta(signature verse).

हम कहांके दानाथे, किस हुनरसे यक्ताथे

बे सबब हुआ ‘गालिब’ दुश्मन आस्मां अपना

Poet says why you are against me? May be whatever I say is wrong ,may be you all are right. I am a simple common man. I don’t have much knowledge (हम कहांके दानाथे). I don’t have any special skills (किस हुनरसे यक्ताथे). I think, I don’t have much knowledge has other side of: maybe you are not capable to understand what I am trying to say. All the revolutionary scientist have felt this. Poet says the same. I tried to capture that thought: “it may be true that poet is not knowledgeable but it is more true that people haven’t tried to understand him”

आज जे आम्ही बोलू त्याविरोधी जन सारे

आम्ही न मोठे जाणते, न आम्हास कोणी जाणले!

Done! Whole ghazal of Ghalib is translated. This is not first time I translated any poem. But translating Ghalib is something worth feeling proud of. I attached that translation and sent to all my friends for their review.

Now I was refreshed to complete Machine Translation assignment. “Premier beach vacation destination” was waiting to be translated…I started reading IBM machine translation model….

iUnknown README.txt

Anup Kulkarni, MTech (almost) 2nd year, CSE...

Only this doesn't make it "iUnknown". "iUnknown" is all about "i was unknown to...". It is an attempt to know the things which were unknown to me. And more correctly its all about the things i recently got known to.

The main content of iUnknown will be poetry and "high school" techies(thanks to Prof. Soumen for coining this term-"high school"). Inspiration for trying to iKnown "high school" things is Prof. Diwan's full toss question and inspiration to write those things here is PK's this post.

Photography and poetry are the two things that make iUnknown to myself. I am not sure about photography but poetry will surely appear here. I like translating poems and its my wish to translate Ghalib in marathi. I don't think i will post anything apart from translations.

So roughly that's agenda. I don't know if i write something apart from this. Some real life exp, some short story, some funny incidence ... may be these things will turn up here, but currently about those things....iUnknown!!!