That 300,000 people celebrated Urdu verse during a three-day festival was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India. The inaugural day of the Urdu poetry festival Jashn-e-Rekhta in ...
A few months ago, at the launch of a book of Urdu poems—Hukm E Safar Diya Tha Kyon by Shantiveer Kaul—a poet in his mid-60s said he rarely got a chance to attend such events now because “ab us peedhi ...