Despite perks and privileges of being able to speak English in Pakistan, Urdu remains to be our first language. No matter how much we eat, speak and wear English, Urdu remains a language that we mourn ...

After we arrived in upstate New York in the fall of 2017 as cultural exchange visitors, we kept thinking about how to introduce the people here to some aspects of Pakistani culture. We kept bouncing ...

Nagma Rehman has a lament in her retired life. Ms. Rehman, who retired a year ago as Urdu teacher at the Baxibagh, Government Higher Secondary School in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, says her school has ...

It’s on a Tuesday evening in January, under a canopy of incandescent bulbs, that I receive my first lesson in Urdu: the difference between alcohol and mirages.I am part of a small mehfil gathered in ...

A rather embarrassing disclaimer first: the last time I read any Urdu prose was during A Levels. Since then, my Urdu reading has been confined to just catching the flash of ‘Breaking News’ on ...

Was it because that after the tumultuous years in which wars had been fought and the country was partitioned that people were finally getting settled in their lives and beginning to realise that a new ...

In 2012, Sanya* joined an institute to learn MS Office. When the teacher was delivering a lecture, she noticed the girl sitting next to her was writing furiously. Her pen danced across the page like ...

Students, cheered on by family and friends, compete in popular Bait Bazi poetry showdown Sharjah: Lovers of the Urdu language, both young and old, enjoyed a popular Urdu poetry contest known as Bait ...

In the latter half of the 19th century, a movement to replace Urdu by so-called Hindi arose with the sole emphasis on replacing the Persian nastaliq script by Nagari. Therefore, institutions like ...