Shiva Kumar

Shiv Kumar Batalvi's interview and immortal Ghazal presented by Balwant Guruany.wmv

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• published: 30 Sep 2010
• views: 52834

This is a unique presentation in terms that you shall first see an interview of the heartthrob of millions, the immortal poet of Punjab, Shiv Kumar Batalvi by Mr Mahendra Kaul, who interviewed Shiv in London, England at the BBC studios and then listen to his ghazal 'Dass ni sharaab diye Botley Kaminiye' sung by Ustad Ghulam Ali. .The interview has been edited and crisped by me in service of my viewers and lovers of immortal Shiv. Shiv was born on 23 July 1936 at village Bara Pind of Shakargarh district, now in Punjab province of Pakistan. A world famous Punjabi poet, he came to be known as 'Birhon daa Sultan', meaning the 'Emperor of pain and Pathos'. In 1967 he was awarded the Sahitya Akademi award. He is the youngest recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award, (India's National Academy of Letters), for his epic verse play 'Loona'. His father, Pandit Krishan Gopal was a tehsildar in the revenue department. Their family moved to Batala in Gurdaspur district after partition of India. When young, he fell in love with the daughter of the noted Punjabi writer Gurbaksh Singh Preetlari. She was married off to a UK citizen because of caste differences between the two. He remained unlucky in love and many scholars believe that this loss reflected intensely in his poetry. I am of the opinion that it was his over sensitive and poetic nature, and a harsh and insensitive father, and not just his lost lady love, which turned him in to a poet and that too an immortal poet. He started writing poetry even before he met the lady in question. In 1968, after being married in 1967, he shifted to Chandigarh, where he joined the State Bank of India, as a PRO. In the following years, he suffered bad health because of excessive drinking, though he continued to write prolifically. On 7 May 1973, at the age of 35, he died of liver cirrhosis as a result of chronic alcoholism at his father-in-law's house at Pathankot, where he lived then. 'He is a poet' (such creative souls never die) so, he is a poet, who rules over millions of hearts all over the world as a result of deeply sorrowful and sad poems that he wrote, the likes of which may rarely be found even in the world's complete modern poetic literature. This Video presentation has been created and uploaded for the music and poetry connoisseurs of Indian subcontinent by Balwant Gurunay and is is dedicated to 'SHIV, Birhon Da Sultan'.