There was a point of time in my life when I thought there were only two people in this world who’d captured the essence of my soul-Kumar Vishwas & John Green.

One is a Hindi poet from Pilkhuwa who performs like he’s setting the stage on fire. The other is an American YA author who writes about dying teenagers finding meaning. They have nothing in common except this: they taught me what soz-e-qalb means.

The burning of the heart. The ache you carry. The thing you learn to speak.

I should start earlier.

मैं बचपन में ख़्वाब बुनता था
मेरे अंजाम की वो इब्तिदा थी

I used to weave dreams in childhood. That was the beginning of my end.

My father was abusive. My parents separated when I was young. I went to live with my mamu in Gurgaon; my mother lived alone in Delhi; my brother stayed with my nani & other mamu in Roorkee. We were scattered like shrapnel.1

The way I survived was escape. I’d build stories in my head. Elaborate ones. Whole worlds. It was cheaper than therapy and more reliable than adults. I learned early: dreams are what help you survive.

2011 or 2012. Drop year, maybe. I don’t remember exactly.

I’m in my room at mamu’s house, sitting in front of my old PC-which I considered to be my first love, honestly. It’s around 3pm, just back from school or coaching. No internet ofcourse. I click on a video shared by a friend.2

A skinny guy standing on stage. No props. No theatrics. Just orating the hell out of a poem, with funny anecdotes sprinkled in. The audience is losing it. He’s losing it. I’m losing it.

I loop the video. Again. Again. I start singing it to my school friends. I don’t fully understand all the Urdu, but I understand this line:

धरती की बेचैनी को बस बादल समझता है

Only the cloud understands the restlessness of the earth.

How two lovers can be apart and yet understand each other. How distance doesn’t kill connection-it is the connection. The longing is the point.

Maybe that’s why it hit me. My family was scattered across cities, but we still understood each other. The separation wasn’t the end. The cloud and the earth, apart but connected.

That’s soz-e-qalb. I didn’t have the word yet. But I had the feeling.

Vishwas wasn’t the destination. He was the gateway drug.3

2013.

First heartbreak. The kind that only hits a 20-year-old the way it does-completely, dramatically.

I consumed everything she’d ever recommended.

I needed escape. And somewhere in that need, I found John Green.

I don’t remember which book I read first. An Abundance of Katherines, maybe? My Goodreads says I read The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns, and Abundance of Katherines all in March 2013. Then Looking for Alaska, Let It Snow, Will Grayson Will Grayson by summer.

I was looking at the world through the eyes of Green’s YA characters. Colin Singleton, who’d been dumped by 19 Katherines and was trying to build a mathematical theorem to predict heartbreak. Quentin Jacobsen, who follows Margo Roth Spiegelman across the country because she vanished and he can’t let go.4

The breakup was tough. The escape made it bearable.

There’s a quote in The Fault in Our Stars that lodged itself in my brain:

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught… And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.

I was 20. I thought this was the most profound thing ever written. I still kind of do.

If oblivion is inevitable, then what matters isn’t being remembered. What matters is the burning while you’re here. The soz-e-qalb.

Winter, 2013 or 2014. The Aam Aadmi Party days.

I’m at home-we’d moved to Jafrabad by then-and I’m studying for an exam. I hear a voice outside. Familiar. Electric.

I tell my mom: “This sounds like Vishwas.”

She peeps through the window. “Haan, wahi hai.”

He’s at Markazi Chowk. 80 meters from my house. Rallying for Kejriwal.

I run. Down two floors. Slippers on. Torn lower-I don’t care. December cold-I don’t care. I stand in the gully for 45 minutes, shivering, just to hear him speak.5

My mom could see me from the window the whole time.

2017 or 2018. I’m doing my MTech. We’ve just shifted house again. I discover The Anthropocene Reviewed-John Green’s podcast where he reviews facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale.6

There’s an episode where he talks about depression. About staring at a bottle of Sprite for hours, unable to move, until his parents had to come and help him. The frankness of it. The refusal to perform wellness.

I thought: you’re allowed to say this out loud?

Green didn’t teach me to feel. Vishwas did that. Green taught me to speak-to be honest about being broken. To say “I’m not okay” without dressing it up.

My own bipolar post exists because of him. I wanted to be that open.

The Green brothers-John and Hank-call their community “Nerdfighters.”7 I consider myself one. They’re model citizens of the internet: curious, kind, committed to reducing worldsuck. I want to be like that. To give back a fraction of what the world has given me.

August/September 2019. My office does an annual Hindi Diwas event. Poetry recitation.

I sign up. I recite my friend Harish’s poetry. The next year, Iqbal. Javed Akhtar. The year after that, I start reciting my own.

Consumer to creator. Listener to speaker.

Iqbal has a sher that captures it:8

गए दिन कि तन्हा था मैं अंजुमन में
यहाँ अब मिरे राज़-दाँ और भी हैं

Gone are the days I was alone in the gathering. Now I have confidants here too.

Vishwas pulled me into Hindi poetry. Green gave me permission to be honest about my mess. Both taught me that earnestness isn’t cringe-that you can feel things loudly and talk about them. That soz-e-qalb is meant to be spoken.

I still loop “Koi Deewana Kehta Hai” sometimes. I still listen to The Anthropocene Reviewed when I need to feel less alone. They were there when no one else was.

धरती की बेचैनी को बस बादल समझता है।

The cloud understood. So did they.

  1. I’ve written about some of this in my bipolar post. The domestic violence, the separation, the inheritance of mood disorders. This isn’t that post. But you can’t understand soz-e-qalb without knowing there was something to burn. ↩

  2. This one. “Koi Deewana Kehta Hai” by Kumar Vishwas. ↩

  3. Every Hindi poetry lover I know has a Vishwas phase. He’s the accessible entry point-funny, performative, emotionally maximal. You graduate from him, but you never forget him. Over the years, the doors kept opening-Ghalib, Faiz, Jaun Elia. My mother, a Hindi teacher, would explain the hard Urdu words I couldn’t parse. ↩

  4. Paper Towns hit hardest. The girl ups and leaves. The guy follows. Relatable to breakup-phase me. ↩

  5. It wasn’t even a poetry session. It was a political speech. But it was him. The voice. The fire. That was enough. ↩

  6. It became a book in 2021. But I listened to the podcast first, during afternoons at home or on the metro commute. ↩

  7. Not people who fight nerds. People who fight for nerds. The distinction matters. ↩

  8. From “Sitaron se aage jahan aur bhi hain” — one of his most famous ghazals. ↩