On Mirza Ghalib’s birthday, his couplets travel effortlessly across continents, languages, and generations. They are quoted in classrooms, shared on social media, sung in ghazals, and debated by scholars. Yet in Agra, the city where Ghalib was born in 1797, remembrance remains faint, formal, and painfully inadequate.

Agra proudly calls itself the city of love. The Taj Mahal gleams as its eternal symbol. The Yamuna flows past marble dreams and Mughal memories. But the city seems unsure how to honour one of its most precious sons, the greatest poet of Urdu, a man who gave language to longing, doubt, irony, and heartbreak.

Every year, Ghalib’s birth anniversary is marked by a token gesture. A ritualistic mushaira in a hotel hall. A few well-known poets, polite applause, ceremonial photographs. By the next morning, the city moves on. There is no living memory, no space that allows citizens or visitors to encounter Ghalib in depth.

The lanes of Kala Mahal, where Ghalib first opened his eyes, carry no sign of that extraordinary birth. No plaque. No museum. No modest memorial. Activists and lovers of Urdu poetry have raised their voices for decades, demanding that the poet’s birthplace be acquired and preserved. They have asked for a Ghalib Chair at Agra University, a research centre, an auditorium, and a proper library dedicated to Urdu literature. Their demands echo and fade, unheard by those in power.

This neglect is especially ironic because Agra was once Akbarabad, a city steeped in literary culture. It produced Mir Taqi Mir, the poet of pain; Nazeer Akbarabadi, the chronicler of everyday life; and Mirza Ghalib, the philosopher of the heart. Together, they shaped the soul of Urdu poetry. Yet the city today remembers monuments of stone better than legacies of the mind.

Tourists from Pakistan and West Asia often arrive in Agra with a simple question: Where was Ghalib born? Guides hesitate. Locals apologise. There is little to show. Even the tourism industry recognises the missed opportunity. “Build a proper memorial,” says a hotelier. “People will come not just for the Taj, but for poetry.” But such voices dissolve like mist over the Yamuna.

Ghalib left Agra in his teens and found recognition in Delhi, under the patronage of Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. There, his genius flowered. He died in 1869. But his poetry belongs to no single city. It belongs to anyone who has ever loved deeply, doubted existence, or laughed at life’s contradictions.

“हजारों ख्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख्वाहिश पे दम निकले…” A thousand desires, each demanding breath. Fulfilled and yet unfulfilled. Who has not felt this truth? And yet, in Agra, remembrance is reduced to a lonely park in the cantonment area bearing his name. It is a gesture without gravitas. A nameplate instead of a narrative.

The larger tragedy is that Urdu poetry itself struggles for space today. New voices remain unheard. Reading habits decline. Literary gatherings shrink. The neglect of Ghalib reflects a deeper cultural fatigue, a society increasingly indifferent to words, nuance, and reflection.

Heritage is not only about preserving marble and sandstone. It is also about safeguarding ideas, languages, and imagination. Cities survive not just through monuments, but through memories that breathe.

On Ghalib’s birthday, Agra must ask itself an uncomfortable question: can it truly call itself a city of culture while ignoring the poet who defined an entire language’s emotional universe?

Until that answer arrives, Ghalib’s spirit will continue to wander the forgotten lanes of Kala Mahal, asking softly, stubbornly, eternally, “आखिर इस दर्द की दवा क्या है…”