I think that would avoid love,

That I would make encouragement and hope strangers to my heart.

I think that love is a disgraceful madness,

A crown of useless, idiotic thoughts,

A lust for making a free man a slave,

A fanciful struggle to make a stranger one’s own.

.

I think that love is the first and the last stages of drunkenness,

That from its glow is lit the expanse of being.

I think that love is the nature of human beings;

For it to be erased is difficult;

I think that life is shining from love;

To put out this candle is now very hard.

.

I think that there are strange conditions on love;

In this civilization, there are many conditions upon happiness.

I think that love is a saddened corpse

Enshrouded in a sheet of dignity and honor;

It is a disgraced being, trampled in the age of capitalism

Kicked out from the place of veneration, religion and ethics.

.

I think that the madness of man and love

Is a futile task in such a decayed civilization.

I think that loving love will not escape alive;

Before that time when the rotting corpse will be putrefied,

It’s better that, being a stranger to love,

I search for the feeling of hatred in my heart

.

And avoid the frenzy of love,

Make the heart a stranger to encouragement and hope.

.

From: Talk̲h̲iyān̲ (Bitternesses). Dihlī: Panjābī Pustak Bhanḍār, 1963. pp. 56 – 58