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In the fading glow of 19th-century Delhi, where poetry still hummed through marble halls and Mughal grandeur sighed into memory, Mirza Ghalib was more than a man of verse. He was a philosopher of pleasure, one who found poetry not just in language, but in the quiet rituals of living. Among those rituals, legend has it, was a drink that mirrored his mind perfectly: rosewater gin, a fusion of refinement and rebellion, much like the poet himself. Scroll down, and you’ll find how this forgotten poetic elixir can still be recreated today. Ghalib never drank to forget; he drank to remember. His relationship with pleasure was contemplative, an art, not an escape. Where others saw intoxication, he saw inspiration. According to accounts that circle in literary lore, he was said to favour

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