मरीज़े-ग़म इसी उम्मीद में दम तोड़ जाएंगे
जिन्होंने ज़ख़्म बख़्शे हैं वही मरहम लगाएंगे

किसे मालूम था आख़िर कि ऐसे दिन भी आएंगे
बशर तो चीज़ क्या मौसम भी बंदिश भूल जाएंगे

दरख़्तों के गिराने पर ज़मीं तो काँप उट्ठेगी
मगर हमदम परिन्दे चह्चहाना भूल जाएंगे

वो जिनके हाथ होंगे कश्तियों के ग़र्क करने में
यहाँ कश्ती बचाने का वही ईनाम पाएंगे

चमन में उगने वाली पौध की यूँ परवरिश होगी
न होंगे रंगो-बू अपने जब उस पर फूल आएंगे

सुलह बर्को-बला से कर तो लेंगे हम मगर जब तक
हवा के तेज़ झोंके ही नशेमन फूँक जाएँगे

जो हमसे बच गईं मासूम बच्चों तुम गिरा देना
तआसुब की ये दीवारें हिला तो हम ही जाएंगे


--------ग़ज़लकार-मासूम ग़ाज़ियाबादी-----------

1.                                                        INTRODUCTIONI
 know what it is like to forget someone's name. In my time, I have forgottenappointments, telephone numbers, speeches, punch lines of jokes, directions,even whole chapters of my life. Up until recently, I was the most absent-minded, forgetful person you could imagine. I once saw a cartoon of twopeople dancing rather awkwardly at the Amnesiacs' Annual Ball. The man wassaying to the woman, 'Do I come here often?' I knew how he felt.Within the last four years, I have become the World Memory Champion. Iregularly appear on television and tour the country as a celebrity 'MemoryMan', rather like Leslie Welch did in the 1950s. There's no trickery in what Ido - no special effects or electronic aids. I just sat down one day and decidedenough was enough: I was going to train my memory.LEARNING HOW TO USE YOUR BRAINImagine going out and buying the most powerful computer in the world. Youstagger home with it, hoping that it will do everything for you, even write yourletters. Unfortunately, there's no instruction manual and you don't know thefirst thing about computers. So it just sits there on the kitchen table, staringback at you. You plug it in, fiddle around with the keyboard, walk around it,kick it, remember how much money it cost. Try as you might, you can't get thestupid thing to work. It's much the same with your brain.The brain is more powerful than any computer, far better than anythingmoney can buy. Scientists barely understand how a mere ten per cent of itworks. They know, however, that it is capable of storing and recalling enor-mous amounts of information. If, as is now widely accepted, it contains an esti-mated 1012 neurons, the number of possible combinations between them(which is the way scientists think information is stored) is greater than thenumber of particles in the universe. For most of us, however, the memory sitsup there unused, like the computer on the kitchen table.There are various ways of getting it to work, some based on theory, someon practice. What you are about to read is a method I have developed inde-pendently over the last five years.