Following is one of Mirza Ghalib’s famous ghazals. We think it will be interesting if we let our readers try to translate it. You can choose a language and style of your own. You can translate it in English or salees (easy) Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi etc. You can translate it funny, silly or melancholy. You can turn it into a ‘azad nazm’ or even make ‘nasr’ (prose) or a story out of it. Wanna take this challenge? Bring out your creativity. There is no wrong answer here.
What distinguishes Asim Butt from his generation and perhaps the preceding generations of artists is the sheer originality of his vision and an iconoclasm that is neither trumpeted nor made visible until the subtext of his lines is closely studied.
This is why Asim has undertaken bold strides during the last 10 enriching years of painting. In the meantime, he also earned a degree or two in social sciences, a half-finished PhD at the University of California and formal training from Karachi’s Indus Valley school of Art and Architecture.
Art education in Pakistan, despite its deep- seated tradition of experimentation, does not allow the full exploration of originality. This is why the revival of miniatures has become another soft tool of marketisation and an out-of-wedlock union between art and commercialism. Rejecting what is on the horizon of Pakistani art, Asim Butt has stuck to his innate traumas and nightmares, sometimes indulging them, at others softening them with figures that blend the sensuous with the spiritual and the political with the existential.
That his early works display a cracked sense of the self is not surprising. A rebel from his conventional background, Butt continues to defy the conformist meanings of family, career, security, sexuality and that elusive bourgeois pursuit of happiness. Inspired by the Stuckism movement of art, Asim holds painting as a powerful medium of communication. This standpoint brings our young Pakistani Stuckist at odds with the skin-deep novelty and claimed nihilism of “conceptual” art and postmodernism. The pursuit of art in this worldview thus merges into an impulse for a renewal of spiritual values in art and society, or what is known as “re-modernism.” In Asim’s own words:
God, You created the night, I made the lamp
You created the earth, I made earthen pot out of it
It is me who created the mirror out of stone
It is me who made elixir out of poison
Today Pakistan celebrates Allama Iqbal’s birth anniversary with the usual lip-service. The key messages of Iqbal seem to have been lost in the maze of officialdom. This is further exacerbated by the hijacking of Islam and politics by vested interests, not to mention the recent events that have shook us all. Iqbal opposed exploitation, Mullahism, emphasised the principle of movement in Islamic thought; and highlighted “Ijtehad” (re-interpretation) of Islamic teachings through a modern parliamentary framework. Alas, all of that is nearly forgotten.
Reference: http://pakistaniat.com/
I have been upset the entire day. Perhaps it does not matter in the larger scheme of things. But this is a sad, sad day. Qurratulain Hyder, the literary giant of our times is no more. At a personal level it is not just the death of another literary figure but it is far greater and deeper than that. Ainee inspired generations of Urdu readers and there is not a single Urdu writer of post-independence era who has not been influenced by her.
Ainee had a civilizational consciousness that took us beyond the nation-state identities that we are so familiar with in our everyday lives. And, of course there was romance - the notion of eastern and Indic romance - that touched our lives. As I wrote earlier, that the way I have understood the world and perhaps parts of myself were deeply influenced by Ainee.
Reference: http://www.apnaorg.com/
SHAAISTA Nuzhat has done her masters in philosophy on the sociological aspect of Waris Shah’s poetry which, according to her, is limited to the story of Heer-Ranjha, an actual happening of the period of Behlol Lodhi in 1484 AD. Much before the birth of Waris Shah in 1717, at least three versions of Heer were written in Persian starting from Akbar’s period and another five were written before Waris Shah completed his writing in 1180 AH.
The story was and still is very popular among people and the very first available version was written in Punjabi during Akbar’s period by Damodar Das, who belonged to Jhang, the hometown of Heer Sial. Before Waris Shah took up the task of writing Heer on the insistence of his friends, at least four other major Punjabi poets had already recreated this story in their own distinct styles. They included, Chiragh Awan ( D.G. Khan), Ali Haider Multani (Toba Tek Singh), Ahmad Gujjar and Shajehan Muqbal. Waris followed the metre of Muqbal and Ahmad Gujjar. There is a difference in detail but the structure of the story is to a large extent common in all these three accounts.
Reference: http://www.indiasite.com/
Punjab is divided into two distinct language areas: Hindi in West Punjab and Punjabi in East Punjab. This Eastern Punjab dialect developed into a literary language around the beginning of the 17th century whereas Hindki still remains a group of dialects.
By Khalid
Reference: http://www.apnaorg.com
Munir Niazi was the only egoist whose ego irritated no one because it came through with such charm and humour. After Faiz Ahmed Faiz died, someone asked Munir how the great vacuum created by the poet’s death would ever be filled. “That vacuum I was filling even when Faiz was alive,” he replied. Vintage Munir Niazi.
One of his friends and companions from the old days in Lahore, the Punjabi poet and writer Masood Munawwar, who now lives in Norway, reminisced about their long association in a memoir for the Punjabi quarterly Saanj , published from Washington by the Academy of Punjab in North America. Munir’s journey through life began in the small town of Khanpur in District Hoshiarpur, East Punjab. It took him through Srinagar, Bahawalpur and Sahiwal – when it was still Montgomery (though always called “Mintgumri”) – and ended in Lahore on December 26, 2006. While people waited in a hotel auditorium for him where he was to preside over a literary meeting, no one realised that at that precise hour, he lay dying in a city hospital instead. As Munawwar observes wistfully, Munir always had a fascination for the act of dying.
Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib” is one of the best of the Urdu poets. He led a revolution in Urdu poetry with his words. According to the critic Aal Ahemd Sarvar “Ghalib gave brain to our poetry which was till then dominated by the people of heart.”
Ghalib used to have takhallus (pen name) of ‘Asad’ but he listened to this sher
Asad us jafaa par butoN say wafaa ki
me-ray sher shabaash rahmat kHuda ki
He said whose sher is this should get lots of rahmat of God but if it is mine then lots of laanat on me, and he changed his takhallus to ‘ghalib’.
![Mirza Ghalib [1796-1869]](http://www.views.pk/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/00088jpg.gif)
the beginning…
He was born in 1796 in Akbarabad (present Agra). His father Abdullah Beg Khan and Uncle Nasrullah Beg Khan were in the Army. Mirza Ghalib become orphaned when he was just 5 years old. He lived with his uncle for 4 years, when his uncle too died.
‘Urdu‘ is a Turkish word which means ‘foreign’ or ‘horde’. This just shows that the language represents it’s origin being an amalgamation of foreigners with the natives of South Asia. It was formulated by the interaction of foreign army, merchants and immigrants to India. Today, it is the national language of Pakistan and is quite similar to the neighbouring country India’s national language Hindi. Infact, the grammar of Urdu is quite similar to Hindi. The forte of the language has been and still is it’s literature that has some master pieces. Likewise, poets like Mirza Ghalib, Allama Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz have had a give and take relation with the language. Where they took the language as a bridge between their thoughts and their readers, they also gave the gems of their beautiful poetry to the language.
Urdu involves numerous elements of Arabic as well as Persian. It also derives some matter from Sanskrit, a language still spoken in the city of Multan in Pakistan. Though not a very old language, Urdu is a language full of charm and elegance, a language that holds literature so courtly. Even today when the this native language has almost lost its importance in the country, the ones with a slight poetic and aesthetic sense prefer to express in Urdu only as the language adds the charm to prose and poetry. The legatee of feelings expressed can feel the intensity if it is your sweet heart and the orator may be the content one.
Ishq Mujhko Nahin, Vehshat Hi Sahi
If not love, then let it be madness
Meri Vehshat Teri Shohrat Hi Sahi
Even if my madness is your fame
Katta Keeje Na Taalluk Hamse
Don’t sever these ties with me
Kutch Nahin Hai To Adavat Hi Sahi
Even if nothing but enmity remains
