I keep returning to a moment in one of the videos. Imran Pratapgarhi says, or seems to say, “this country,” then says it again: “This country, this country”. The words are plain. His voice gives them weight.What stayed with me was the thought underneath: That a democracy is longer-lived than any one political whim, trend, wave, or leader. Governments change. The country continues. The people keep speaking.That is where I want to begin with Pratapgarhi — not with a party, a policy or a verdict, but with the sound of a poet addressing a crowd and asking us to listen for something that lasts.In the posts I have been watching, the images move from a microphone to a gathering, from a press scrum to a Parliament corridor, from a man seated among other leaders to a face turned towards an audience. The captions carry couplets and longer poems. One line stays with me:‘Dar par rahoon ya ikhtidar par rahoon,kabhi khamosh nahin rahunga‘.(Whether I stand outside power or within it,I will never be silent).The force lies partly in the refusal to make silence sound like peace. The line is a declaration, but it is also a small performance: the pause, the repetition, the gathering of breath before the second line lands. We hear the meaning, certainly. We also hear the man deciding to say it aloud.Pratapgarhi was already building an audience through ‘mushairas’ (traditional Urdu poetic gatherings) before he took his seat in the Rajya Sabha. In 2018, Scroll reported that more than 30,000 people attended a Jamia Millia Islamia mushaira where he drew the night’s loudest response. The profile also described his decision to bring social and political themes into his poetry.That helps explain the scale of what he does onstage. A ‘mushaira’ is not simply a reading. It is a gathering organised around listening: poets take turns; a line catches; someone in the crowd answers with applause, a murmur, a shout. Urdu poetry has long lived beyond the page, and the mushaira makes that life visible. The audience hears the music, but also watches the moment the words find their listeners.Story continues below this adPratapgarhi’s particular gift, as I hear it, is not polish for its own sake. His storytelling can feel raw, even unvarnished. It does not always have the finesse of a carefully staged performance, and it does not need to. The words come through carrying their meaning. He does not sound as if he is explaining a poem to prove he understands it, or reciting because the occasion requires a recitation. He sounds as if something needs saying. That candor can be more persuasive than finish.There is a verse among the posts that seems to understand the distance a person must walk before arriving at a voice:‘Apni awaargi bhi saath rakho,aage raste bahut thakan ke hain’.(Carry your restlessness with you;the roads ahead are full of weariness).And then:‘Jis ko paala hai Meer-o-Ghalib ne,hum muhafiz usi zabaan ke hain’.(We were nurtured by Mir and Ghalib;we are guardians of that very language).There is pride in those lines, but not the sealed-off pride of a museum. Mir and Ghalib are invoked as living company: poets whose language still feeds the present. The line makes Urdu feel less like an inheritance locked behind glass and more like a shared house, still occupied, still being cared for.I have spent nearly 45 years with Hindustani classical music. Music teaches you that meaning is not only in the note; it is also in the space around it, the breath before it, the note held just long enough to change what came before.Story continues below this adUrdu entered my life through my teacher, Tauqir Ahmad. So when I hear a verse in Roman Urdu, I do not experience it as a substitute for the original script. I hear another way of approaching its sound: the vowels opening, the consonants touching, the thought moving from the tongue towards the ear.A poem can be read silently, of course. But something changes when it is spoken. A line gathers its own weather. A refrain gives listeners something to hold; repetition makes it memorable, but also communal. By the time the crowd speaks a phrase back, the poem has crossed a threshold. It belongs to more than the poet who wrote it.One post offers not a slogan but a warning about how long patience can be asked to last:‘Sabr ka haath thaam kar rakhna,ye jo kuch din hain, imtihaan ke hain‘.(Hold on to patience;These few days are days of trial).‘Zakhm par ghaur karte rahiyega,dekhiye teer kis kamaan ke hain’.(Look closely at the wound;See which bow sent the arrows).Also Read | What it’s really like to be a Gen Z maharaja: Jaipur’s ‘Pacho’ on royalty, tradition and modern lifeThe image turns attention away from the wound alone and towards its cause. That is a particular strength of poetry: it can give feeling a direction. It can make grief speak, but it can also ask who inflicted it, who watched, who looked away. A poem does not settle the argument. It makes it harder to pretend there is no argument to have.Story continues below this adAnother line reaches for the simplest and most difficult metaphor of all:‘Ghar sajaane ka tasavvur to bahut baad ka hai,pehle ye tay ho ke is ghar ko bachayein kaise‘.(Dreaming of how to decorate the house can wait;first, let us decide how to save it).The house could be a home, a country, a shared public life. The line leaves that choice open. It does not need to close the metaphor down. We know the difference between decorating a house and protecting the people inside it. We know, too, that a country is not a possession handed down intact. It is a place we keep making, and sometimes must keep repairing.This is one of the things poetry can do in public life. It can make people feel seen. It can give grief a language before grief has found one of its own. It can take anger that has been scattered and turn it towards courage. A slogan can announce a position; a poem can make us feel the human pressure beneath it. That does not make poetry a substitute for politics, or make every poem wise simply because it rhymes. It means that performance can bring difficult questions into a room in a way a slogan often cannot.Story continues below this adThe posts around Pratapgarhi’s public appearances touch those questions plainly: who is heard, whose pain is taken seriously, what happens when people gather to protest, and what kind of country is being made in their name. I do not want to turn this into a party argument, or pretend a poem settles the claims it makes. His poetry is clearly political. It names power and resistance; it makes accusations, appeals to memory, summons courage. My interest is in the act itself: what happens when someone stands up and gives public feeling a rhythm people can carry away with them.The Rajya Sabha is a different stage, one with rules, procedure and institutional memory. Pratapgarhi took the oath as a member in July 2022, representing Maharashtra. The Indian Express reported at the time that he was born in Uttar Pradesh and had described his “canvas” as the entire country. The shift from the ‘mushaira’ platform to Parliament is striking, but it is not a journey from poetry into public life. His poetry was already addressing public life. Parliament gives that voice another place to stand.It also sharpens the question: who gets heard in India? Who is imagined as belonging in the rooms where the country speaks about itself? I feel a particular pride that a Muslim poet from a minority community can stand in public, speak with candor, and carry his own idiom into the national conversation. That matters to me as an image of a living democracy: not a perfect one, not one beyond argument, but one in which more than one voice can claim the microphone.There is a risk in saying this too neatly, as though the presence of one person proves that everyone is heard. It does not. That is precisely why the question must stay open. A democracy is measured not only by who enters its institutions, but by whether ordinary people’s voices can reach them, and whether the institutions respond. Still, representation has a human dimension. You see a person speaking in a language that carries home, history, and community, and you feel the public world widen a little.Story continues below this adUrdu can widen it further. A reader who has not spent time with the language may first come for the cadence, then discover how a compact image opens. The word ghazal may bring to mind love, longing, separation, music. But the larger tradition has room for lament, satire, witness and argument. A line can move between tenderness and defiance, beauty and accusation, without asking permission to be only one thing.In one poem, the promise is not that justice will arrive neatly or soon, but that people will remember who stood there:‘Lahu mein bheege tamashai gawahi denge,ki tum khade the’.(The blood-soaked witnesses will testify:you were standing there).And in another, the witness is the morning itself:‘Sehar ka suraj gawahi dega,ki jab andheron se nikalne waale ye sochte theki koi jugnu bacha nahin hai,to tum khade the’.(The morning sun will bear witness:when those emerging from darkness thoughtnot a single firefly remained,you were still standing.)Also Read | The hidden world of Khajuraho’s bazaars: Erotic souvenirs, sarees and surprisesThere is something cinematic in that movement—from the darkness, to the imagined firefly, to the person who has not left. But the image does not belong only to a stage. It is also for the listener who has felt that the light has gone out, who has needed one person, one voice, one small sign that the night is not the whole story.That movement between the intimate and the public is where I hear the deepest music in these posts. A poem may begin with the self, but it need not stay there. It can gather a crowd around a feeling that was private until the poet found a way to say it aloud. Music is not decoration laid over the message. It is how the message travels.Story continues below this adI know something about that desire to make language carry. I am finishing 154 ghazals. I imagine, sometimes, what it might be like to read them one day at a ‘mushaira’: to stand before a room and find out which words survive the journey from the page to another person’s ear. That is a different ambition from wanting to be applauded. It is the wish to know whether a line can travel—to someone else’s memory, perhaps, or back into my own.As I write, I think about music and memory, and about an older part of my life that I want to meet again through language. I do not yet know what that return will ask of me. But poetry makes room for it. A ghazal can hold what we remember and what we cannot quite recover. It can make the past audible without pretending we can go back and live there unchanged.Perhaps that is why I respond to the roughness in Pratapgarhi’s performance. There is something reassuring about a voice that does not sand every edge away. The poem does not have to be perfect before it is allowed to matter. It has to be alive enough to reach someone, to carry the pressure of the moment and the sound of the person speaking it.And then comes that phrase, as I remember it: ‘This country, this country, this country‘. I hear in it neither a guarantee nor a victory lap. I hear a reminder that India is more enduring than the temporary arrangements made in its name. Democracy is not secured by one leader, one party, one election or one poem. It stays alive through the difficult, repeated work of speaking and listening: people gathering, questions being asked, grief being named, disagreement being voiced.Story continues below this adThat is what makes poetry in public life worth marvelling at. It brings the distance between the stage and the crowd down to the span of a breath. It turns a word into a shared memory. And for a moment, when the room answers the poet, it lets the country sound like the people still trying to speak within it.