Raza Rumi
Musharraf Ali Farooqi and the Urdu Project have revived a tradition that was fading in the age of instant communication, sms lingo and a dying reading culture. When I started reading the book, I could not help remember the day when my Uncle, Zaheer Ahmad Bhutta, a man of letters and book-lover handed [...]

Raza Rumi
This post is the third in our series on recapping the fall of East Pakistan in 1971. The previous two posts of this series can be read here and here.
Every year the sixteenth day of that deadly December invited little attention in the mainstream media as the new Pakistan struggles to manage the [...]

Raza Rumi
Parveen Shakir (1952-1994) has defined the sensibilities of several generations and beyond. At the relatively young age of 42 years, Parveen Shakir died on an empty Islamabad boulevard, as if this was an essential part of her romantic persona. But she had lived a full life where poetry and tragedy intersected each other and [...]

Raza Rumi
As I hold the recently published “The Oxford Book of Urdu Short Stories” in my hands, I cannot help bemoan the fact that Urdu literature has been almost invisible from the arena of global literature. Admittedly, translation is difficult; the tediousness of translation daunts many a brave heart. Having said that, there have been [...]

Raza Rumi
It was a mellow, moonlit evening of Lahore’s glorious spring when Sachal Studios released their album ‘Tarang’. It could not have been at a more fitting venue. Amid the decaying environs of Old Lahore stands the Haveli of Mian Yusaf Salahuddin, refurbished into a little planet of conservation as a courageous effort to [...]

A cross post from Raza Rumi’s jahan-e-Rumi
Recently while going through some of my late grandfather’s books, I was struck by a feeble looking deewan of Khowaja Fareed. Feeble because it bore the date of 1964 for its inclusion in his impressive book collection. Expressing the thrill of holding a book which had travelled 44 years [...]