Faiz says that a person who is incapable of understanding his own society cannot understand the rest of the world. Little things are connected to each other. We must not ignore these relations. And if one's perception of them is correct, universal values will survive and the literature thus created will last. (Hurriyet, April 9, 1973). Charles Dickens was for long criticised, well by some, for presenting an idealistic picture of his society, while Thackeray is praised for realism. But let's face it. Which of them really represented his society better? Just imagine, the period when the two (almost exact) contemporaries lived. Capitalism, which had released the human energies on an unprecedented scale, was maturing and the British were at the top of the heap. New lands were being conquered constantly and more of the lesser breeds being brought under the British rule. They added to British glory and, much more important, to British wealth, as their labour created more and more surplus to be surrendered to Britain. There was poverty on the islands but no one doubted that the problem would be solved. At the same time, the nature lay at the feet of the man. It revealed its secrets, yielded its riches at his touch. Prospects of progress were boundless. Wealth was almost creating itself. The man had discovered his infinite possibilities. Thackeray dealt with the individual bourgeois and his successes and difficulties. Dickens did too but with the consciousness of the lan, the optimism of the age. Otherwise, "Nicholas Nickleby" would seem childish. At least it could not have been written in nineteenth-century India, well not without the intervention of the super natural. Their third contemporary, Tennyson, in his beautiful dramatic monologue about Tithonus, tried to rise above the human's mundane difficulties but ended up with the bourgeois' mundane difficulties. Tithonus, being trapped in life without youth, rejected life without vigour: "Oh happy men who have the power to die, And the grassy barrows of the happy dead." But, even there, the thought is of gloom giving way to light: "A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes, A glimpse of that dark world where I was born--Thy cheek begins to redden through the gloom, Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine." On the other hand, when Ghalib reminisces about his happier days: Muddat hui hai yar ko mehmen kiye huay, he speaks of it without hope. Phir chahta hun namai dildar kholna is followed soon by: Baithay rahein tassawur-e-janan kiye huay. Where the world was growing brighter by the hour for Western Europe, a gloomy darkness was descending upon India. How long could an Indian poet search for the global connections? This does not mean that there is no lust for life in the dark days and no setbacks in the bright ones. Tithonus had himself asked the goddess, Aurora, for immortality. Only he did not remember to ask for eternal youth with it. Therefore, at the end, he was really begging for release from decrepitude, not from life. Anyway the Greek deities had a streak of meanness in them. Nothing here invalidates Faiz's thesis. It is only that the time factor is absent from his connections. It is absent because he has assumed its presence: Hum apnay daur mein guzray jahan-e-guzran say, Nazar mein raat liye, dil mein aftab liye, Hum apne waqt pay pahonchay huzoor-e-yazdan mein, Zaban pay hamd liye, haath mein sharaab liye. The writer is a former ambassador