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Kaifi Azmi’s “The Son of Mary”/”کیفی اعظمی کی “ابنِ مریم Posted by Rachael on Mar 21, 2018
This week, let’s return to another of the unforgettable poet and lyricist, Kaifi Azmi’s, poems. Similar to “Daera/The Circle” (دائره), Azmi uses his knowledge of diverse belief systems and cultures to enrich his verse and complicate his philosophical stance. This quality of Azmi’s poetry, in addition to his seemingly simple, yet at times abstruse and…
Kaifi Azmi’s “The Circle” Posted by Rachael on Feb 20, 2018
Kaifi Azmi (کیفی اعظمی, or Sayyid Akhtar Hussein Rizvi, as he was born) is one of Urdu’s greatest poets (شاعر/shaayar) and remains legendary to this day as a poet capable of expressing the subtlest of sentiments with uncanny astuteness and daring. You may recognize his name from that of Shabana Azmi, a famous Indian actress who…
A Short History of Urdu / اردو کی چھوٹی سی تاریخ Posted by Rachael on Feb 15, 2018
Urdu is widely known as the national language (قومی زبان/qaumi zabaan where “zabaan” is a fem. noun) of Pakistan, but it is also one of India’s 22 official languages (سرکاری زبان/sarkaari zabaan). Modern Standard Urdu, once commonly known as a variant of Hindustani (ہندوستانی), a colloquial language combining the modified Sanskrit words found in Hindi…