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| اختؔر شاہجہانپوری |
Two things I hear from many young people (and some older people) are:
(a) Their Urdu is weak because their schools never really paid attention to it.
Sabeen Mahmud hated Karachi Grammar School for not giving the children real access to Urdu. When I first met her she spoke good Karachi ‘Urdish’. When she was assassinated - 26 years later - she had already learnt to speak brilliant Urdu, loved its poetry, held Mushaerahs, adored Farsi Kalaam, became a total fan of Qavvaalis, and always spoke in Urdu at local conferences … when it was allowed. She carried a diary and noted down words and phrases in them that she found amusing, amazing, funny, and worth using. That’s a sign of a person growing up, day by day.
I have had several foreign friends ask me if we have a language that we can all speak - for whenever they go to a restaurant the Menus are in English and not Bilingual … and at every table they hear everyone, from parents to children, speaking in English. Even waiters!
I remember many times when Sabeen and I went to restaurants and she said, when served with a drink, "برف ڈال دیجیٴے" (Please put in some ice) the waiter usually said "You want Ice?". She always said " کیا اّپ کو اردو بولنے میں تکلیف ہوتی ہے؟ " (Do you have difficulty speaking in Urdu?)
(b) They have no understanding of Poetry.
This really, really amazes me. All our kids - as well as adults - love songs. These are poetical works - and they all can recite many of them for you. Faiz - whose works are in many homes (some out of fashion, of course) - and Habib Jalib are extremely popular (and even more so after Nayyara, Tina, and Laal sang them).
Occasionally one finds - specially when the school’s annual publications are being written - that students write verses in English. Some of them, without doubt, range from Good to Excellent. In Urdu, too, they write verses (and so do Teachers). But they are - in almost all the cases - quite bad, generally naa-maozooñ, and total lack of any laws of poetry.
The main reason is that they are taught by teachers who, themselves, have no understanding of poetry. In a series of books by a leading publisher here I found many badly quoted verses from senior poets, like Ghalib and Dagh whose divàns are available everywhere (and on Rekhta.org). They even had Ismail Merathi written out wrongly when his works are not only printed but you can listen to them on YouTube. Words were often missing or added and, in case they were written by the Author (which happened in some books), some were completely off the meter or had several meters in one ghazal.
Awful!!!
Sadly, many people - if not most - don’t even know of the various forms of poetry. Not only do they not know of the forms that ghazals or nazms take, they can’t decide if what is being recited is one or the other. This was more surprising when a famous singer said he would sing a Faiz ghazal on TV and proceeded with a nazm. I asked him and he said "I wasn't ever corrected by the TV people."
Hmmm.
When our kids go to private schools (which are all English Medium!), they learn famous childish verses, like “Mary had a little lamb” … or even read Limericks like “There was a young man of Khartoum”. When a little older, they are asked to write a poem on a cat, or a family member. Even older, they play Limerick Games.
Do we do that in our Urdu class? Does you teacher ask you to write a shayr? Does she explain what that should really mean and talk about its laws. Not just little kids but even grown-ups are never taught that, whether the students choose Easy Urdu or Urdu as a First Language.
(No idea now, though, with English Literature having been no longer taught in many schools, if my examples of English in higher classes really apply.)
I ran a few courses at T2F about Urdu Poetry. There were 10 students at each course that lasted for 8-10 Saturday afternoons. A small class is always more useful because interactions are more common and misunderstandings are also taken care of. Attendees ask better questions and some answer them well, or discuss them.
In addition, having grown up in a family where poetry and poets were always part of our lives, I also included anecdotes from various poets. This allows students to get to know more about the poets than just reading or hearing their poetry.
I hope many more people will have courses about such things. At T2F Zahra Sabri had a couple of courses on older poets and Musharraf Ali Farooqui did a series on Ghalib.
Apart from that there have been Mushaerahs at T2F, with some of our top poets (Iftikhar Arif, Anwar Shaoor and more), recitations by Zehra Nigah, Attiya Dawood, and Azra Abbas, and several seminars on Ghalib and Jaun Elia. Do attend them when they happen ... and, at the end, talk to the people there and ask questions. It will make your world (and our world) better.
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Urdu is our National Language and must be taught correctly. And so should all our Provincial Languages, wherever they are taught.
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10th December Addition
Another mistake by someone that I saw on Facebook today.
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