Kshitij and Burair trace Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's 1977 qawwali "Dil Pe Zakhm Khaate Hain" back to poet Iqbal Safipuri, go couplet by couplet through its Sufi double meaning, and follow it forward into Dhurandhar: The Revenge, where it returns as "Jaan Se Guzarte Hain." Featuring Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Satinder Sartaaj along the way.

Retired school principal turned author Darshana Arjun "Vijeta" joins Kshitij and Burair for a conversation that moves between poetry, memory, and the women history forgets. She talks about being called "Teacher Bitiya" at nine years old, the father whose words still guide her, and building her own name — Darshana, Arjun, Vijeta — piece by piece. Along the way, she recites poems for her father, for the "aazaad nari" she refuses to be anything less than, and for her grandmother's village, and talks about the silent heroines — women like Radha Bhua and Gangā — who live on in her stories.

The finale: the artisans who built the Taj Mahal couldn't light a lamp on their own family's graves. Kshitij and Burair close the poem, debate whether Sahir hates the monument or is just exploring it from an angle no one else had, and trace his fire forward to "Main Zindagi Ka Sath Nibhata Chala Gaya" from Hum Dono (1961).

Sahir calls the Taj Mahal and its forts "old wounds" carrying the blood of common ancestors. Kshitij and Burair connect that same fury to "Aurat Ne Janam Diya Mardon Ko" from Sadhna (1958), and ask why only the powerful get to advertise their love.

Kshitij and Burair open a three-part series on Sahir Ludhianvi's "Taj Mahal" — the 1945 nazm that turned Urdu poetry's most romantic landmark into a class critique. Part 1 covers Sahir's roots in the Progressive Writers' Movement and the poem's opening refusal: meet me somewhere else.

Twenty-two couplets of hearsay about one impossibly magnetic beloved — moons that won't look away, deer that show up just to compare eyes. Burair takes Ahmad Faraz's ghazal to Kshitij couplet by couplet, and the explanations detour through Game of Thrones and How I Met Your Mother. Kavinaama, hosted by Kshitij Kawatra and Burair Ashary.

An old favorite, revisited. Kshitij and Burair sit with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's "Tum Ek Gorakh Dhandha Ho" —a qawwali built around one impossible line: "ho bhi nahi aur har ja ho," you are nowhere, and yet everywhere.The conversation moves through the story of Adam, the martyrdom of the Sufi mystic Mansur al-Hallaj, and theevents of Karbala, using each to get closer to what the poem is really asking about the nature of God, presence,and absence. Whether this is your first time hearing the song or your hundredth, this episode is a way back intoit.Part of the Kavinaama series, where we sit with South Asian poetry, music, and the ideas underneath them.

Tasleem Fazli's ghazal for Mehdi Hassan, sher by sher — a poem built entirely on three-step escalations, from jaan-e-jaanaan to the aap/tum/tū of its final couplet. Plus the true story of Fazli and his brother Nida Fazli, split across the India-Pakistan border.

The ghazal behind Arooj Aftab's Grammy-winning "Mohabbat" — written a century earlier by Hafeez Hoshiarpuri, and carried since by Mehdi Hassan, Farida Khanum, and Ali Sethi. Kshitij and Burair go sher by sher through Hoshiarpuri's most famous ghazal, bringing in Ghalib, Majnu-Laila, Faiz, and — somehow — Frasier.

Hosted by Kshitij Kawatra & Burair Ashary.

A ghazal so loved that people now think of it as Begum Akhtar's, not Shakeel Badayuni's.

Begum Akhtar made "Ae Mohabbat Tere Anjaam Pe Rona Aaya" hers — so completely that audiences would demand she sing it again, once five times in a single sitting. Kshitij and Burair trace its journey from her raga Bhairavi rendition to Osman Mir singing it at Morari Bapu's Ramkatha gatherings, then take a detour into how poets' pen names end up outliving them as their sons' surnames — Jan Nisar Akhtar's "Akhtar," carried forward by Javed and Salman; Harivansh Rai Bachchan's "Bachchan," carried forward by Amitabh.

Then back to the ghazal itself, sher by sher — ending on the couplet where Shakeel loops the whole poem back to the very word he opened on.