Jo Jaagat Hai Woh Paavat Hai

“The early bird gets the worm” in Hindi is “Jo Jaagat hai woh paavat hai.”

This is an Indian proverb (Punjabi Proverb) that my dad’s father used to say to him and his brothers in the morning. It essentially a phrase we’ve heard before in English, but the Hindi version of it means that phrases like this were also translated across countries and languages, but have the same meaning at heart. My dad has often said this phrase out loud to us when we were children, but he also said I had the same reaction as he did when his father would say it to him: to crawl back under our covers and continue to sleep. My dad said that his grandfather told his father this phrase, and so his father began to say it to him, and he began to say it to my brothers and I. He’d say this phrase to tell us to get up early, because the one who rises early “wins the day.”