25/08/2026
In these poignant lines, Ahmad Salman turns an ordinary street scene into a powerful commentary on morality, inequality, and human dignity. In the opening couplet, he contrasts the way people judge life through the conventional categories of sin and virtue with his own experience of witnessing a daily “day of reckoning.” The phrase suggests that for those living on society’s margins, judgment is not merely a religious or distant idea—it is something they encounter repeatedly through hardship, poverty, and social injustice.
The second couplet makes this social critique even more striking. Salman asks people not to walk carelessly over the footpath because, at night, workers sleep there and dream. The footpath therefore becomes more than a piece of pavement: it represents the fragile boundary between survival and dignity. The poet forces the privileged passer-by to recognize that the space beneath their feet may be someone else's only shelter. The contrast between people casually walking over the pavement and labourers dreaming upon it creates a deeply humane image of inequality. These verses reflect Ahmad Salman's realist approach to poetry, in which everyday scenes become windows into neglected lives and deteriorating human values.
POET — Ahmad Salman
Ahmad Salman is a Pakistani Urdu poet associated with Karachi, born in 1964. Rekhta describes him as a prominent poet known for his participation in mushairas in Pakistan and abroad. Its profile also notes that he has spent a significant part of his life in Canada. His poetry moves across love, grief, social realities, human relationships, and the condition of ordinary people. His verses often combine emotional sensitivity with sharp observation of society, particularly the lives of people who remain unseen or unheard.
His poetry repeatedly demonstrates this ability to find the extraordinary within ordinary human experiences. The famous couplet about workers dreaming on the footpath is specifically catalogued by Rekhta under the theme of “Mazdoor” (labourer), reinforcing its social and working-class context. His wider body of work includes ghazals and individual couplets dealing with human sufferi
