Syed Wali Aalam was born on 11 January 1938, in the Ghazipur village of district Munger in the state of Bihar. He is popularly known as Shaaheen Ghazipuri, where Shaheen is his pen name. On the educational front, he has done his Masters in Statistics from Bihar University and M.Sc in Mathematical Statistics from Carlton University Canada. He worked as a lecturer at Marwari College, Bhagalpur from 1960 to 1964. Following that, he was employed as a master statistician for the Government of Pakistan. Later, in 1971, he was given the charge of the statistics department of Aadam Ji Jute mill. In 1973, he went to Canada. He kept working for different departments of the Central Government for a period of twenty years and later, opted for voluntarily retirement from the post of policy adviser in ministry of transport. Alhough, he had started to write poetry at a very tender age, it gathered momentum since 1955. Rag-e-Saaz, Dehleez par Phool and Benishaan are the three collections of his poetry. Dreams and Destination is a collection of his Urdu poems, translated in English.