group of friends is driving through Lahore when someone mischievously plays an Attaullah Esakhelvi song. “Pyaar naal na sahi, ghusse naal vekh leya kar.” The car erupts in laughter. “What is this?!” someone says. “So cringe!”

A few songs later, someone queues up Mehdi Hassan. “Aa phir say mujhay chhor kay jaanay kay liyay aa.” This time, nobody laughs. Someone quietly says “wah.” Another repeats the line under his breath.

The strange thing is that both songs are pleading for the same impossible mercy. One lover says, “If not with love, at least look at me in anger.” The other says, “Come back, even if it is only to leave me again.” Both are willing to sacrifice pride for one last glimpse of the beloved. Yet one lyric is dismissed as melodramatic, the other celebrated as sublime.

My observation is that the difference lies not in the poetry, but in the people we imagine behind it.

We often think of ‘cheap’ as a description of quality. It rarely is. Cheap perfume, cheap furniture, cheap clothing, cheap poetry. The adjective carries an entire social world. It tells us less about the object than about who is expected to consume it. Marketers quietly rely on this too, using price as a signal of quality to justify higher status and higher value, even when it isn’t. Taste has always been one of the quietest ways societies organise themselves. As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued, our likes and dislikes are rarely natural; most are learnt behaviour. We inherit them through education, family, language and class until they begin to feel like instinct.

Pakistan has its own hierarchy of taste. Poetry sits comfortably within it.

For centuries, Persian was the language of power across much of South Asia. It belonged to courts and scholarship. Urdu later inherited much of that prestige, becoming the language of refined expression and literature. Punjabi, despite producing poets like Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah and Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, slowly became associated with everyday life rather than high culture. It became the language of homes, fields, transport and labour.

That hierarchy has survived long after Persian disappeared from public life. Many Pakistanis switch from Punjabi to Urdu the moment they enter a formal setting. Parents proudly raise children who speak fluent English but quietly accept that they cannot speak the language of their grandparents. Punjabi is often treated as something earthy, emotional and (whether we agree with it or not) uncultured. Urdu carries dignity. English is in another league altogether.

Attaullah’s directness sounds excessive to many urban ears because it arrives in the language and idiom of ordinary people. Had the same longing been wrapped in Persian imagery and polished Urdu metaphors, we might have called it timeless.

This is not to suggest that all poetry is equally good, or that literary greatness is merely a matter of privilege. Faiz is revered because he possessed extraordinary craft, but he also belonged to a world that recognised and preserved literature. He was educated, widely read, published, translated and discussed. Universities, critics and publishers ensured his words travelled through generations.

Now imagine a truck driver who writes verses while waiting for cargo to be unloaded. Or a mason who carries crumpled pages in his pocket. Their poems may never leave the roadside tea stall where they are recited. One poet enters anthologies; the other enters WhatsApp forwards, truck bumpers and photocopied collections sold outside railway stations. We often mistake this difference in circulation for a difference in worth.

Education shapes taste in subtler ways too. The more we read, the more we learn to admire restraint, ambiguity and layered meanings. We begin to distrust anything that reveals itself too quickly. Simple emotions start to feel unsophisticated. But for those who have truly experienced it, grief is rarely subtle. Most people do not experience loss in elegant metaphors. They experience it in blunt sentences that would make a literature professor wince.

Perhaps that is why ‘cheap poetry’ survives despite being mocked. It is not trying to impress critics, it is trying to stand by your raw emotions.

The internet has only strengthened this divide. Poetry no longer belongs to literary magazines or publishing houses. It belongs to Facebook captions, TikTok videos and Instagram reels. The gatekeepers who once decided what deserved to be called literature are losing their power.

At the same time, Gen Z has given us a new word for expressions that violate contemporary taste: cringe. Cringe is rarely about grammar or rhyme. More often, it is about sincerity. It is what we call people who care too openly, love too visibly or reveal too much of themselves without the protective layer of irony. Attaullah asks for love without embarrassment. He begs. He repeats himself. He refuses emotional distance. He does it all without feeling the need to not oversimplify his thoughts.

Ironically, this is also why his songs endure. They speak the emotional language of people who cannot afford complexity - or sophistication - when their hearts are breaking.

Perhaps we laugh at ‘cheap’ poetry because it reminds us of feelings we have spent years learning to disguise. We have been taught that good taste means emotional restraint, that educated people hint instead of confessing, that longing must be dressed in metaphors, in a polished language before it becomes respectable.

But pain has never cared much for ‘respectability’, so to say.

The next time someone laughs at “Pyaar naal na sahi, ghussay naal vekh leya kar,” it is worth asking what exactly sounds ridiculous. The plea itself, or the class, language and life experiences we instinctively associate with the man making it.

So, “Aur bhi dukh hain zamanay mein muhabbat kay siwa…” Because some are understood, while others are only ever laughed at for the same feeling.

Kiva Malick is an academician and a writer