Ghazal of 1,495 couplets penned

He has now come up with a ghazal containing more than twice the number of couplets than in his earlier record.

Born on July 29, 1947 in Batala in Gurdaspur district of Punjab, Ghairat trained to be a lawyer. He, however, took up his family business of manufacturing lead machines. In 1965, he began taking keen interest in poetry, inspired by Pandit Biharilal Shant, a well-known Urdu/Hindi poet and a protégé of Ibn-e-Insha, another reputed Urdu poet. Till date, he has written 13 books, three in the Urdu script. “Initially, I wrote in Urdu script. Later, on my Guru’s insistence, I used the Devanagiri script. But the language of my poetry remains Urdu,” he said.

His work Tashreeh-e-Ghazal-e-Mukhtasar (summary of a small ghazal) fetched him a place in the Limca Book of Record. The Guinness Book of World Records said it could not place his work in its annals as it is ‘a too specialised achievement for a body of reference as general as ours.’ In order to better his achievement, Ghairat penned ‘Ghazal-e-Mukhtasar Gamzan’ (the small ghazal is advancing) with 1,495 couplets, setting a new world record, as he puts it.