Irshad Kamil at Panjab University’s Hindi department
Department of Hindi, Panjab University organized ‘Rukhsat 2018’ the farewell ceremony for M.A fourth semester students on Wednesday.
The students of the department presented a cultural program and brought together the folk dances like Gidda, Himachali Naati and Rajasthani folk dance.
The chief guest for the event was celebrated Bollywood lyricist Dr Irshad Kamil.
He awarded 26 meritorious students with various scholarships. He also presented the special scholarship as a tribute to his mother Begum Iqbal to two meritorious students, Divya and Manjinder.
The Department presented Kamil with his portrait as a souvenir.
Chairperson of Hindi dept, Dr Gurmeet Singh said that the highlight of the program was participation from a number of alumni of the department.
The judges panel comprised choreographer Preeti Arora, budding actor Satish Yadav and transgenderr activist Dhananjay.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News> City News> Chandigarh News / TNN / May 02nd, 2018
Library, career counselling & English-speaking on cards
PURE INTENT: Members of Paigham-e-Islam Masjid and Islamic Centre pose for a picture in Mango, Jamshedpur, on Thursday. Picture by Bhola Prasad
Jamshedpur:
At a time of increasing suspicion and intolerance, an upcoming mosque here seeks to build bridges with knowledge and wisdom.
Paigham-e-Islam Masjid and Islamic Centre in Mango will be arguably a first of its kind mosque in Jharkhand with a library offering Islamic books along with those of Hindi, English and Urdu literature and a reading room.
These apart, the learning centre attached to the mosque will offer English-speaking classes to poorer students and youths, tuition for competitive exams, career counselling and inspirational talks by teachers and professionals from various fields. People of other faiths would be welcome to participate in discussions and seminars and use the library and reading room.
The mosque and the learning centre will be run by Paigham-e-Islam Education and Welfare Trust, an outfit formed in 2011 with the cream of Muslim intelligentsia in Jamshedpur and some NRIs, including academics, lawyers, bureaucrats, social workers and professionals, as members.
The Trust members said they were inspired by the holy Al-Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina, a mosque built by the Prophet himself, and his final resting place.
Religious scholar and social worker Syed Saifuddin Asdaque, the director-founder of the Paigham-e-Islam Education and Welfare Trust, said they always wanted to be a part of a mosque that would spread peace, knowledge and wisdom.
“As far as our knowledge goes, a mosque with books on literature and a reading room nowhere exists in India. Though we have less space now (2,400sqft), we plan to expand with more such innovative plans in the future,” he said. “We know this has never happened before here but we are trying to bring something new.”
Intellectuals associated with the Paigham-E-Islam Masjid are optimistic of the venture.
Karim City College English professor Yahiya Ibrahim, who is a member of the advisory board of the Trust, called the proposed activities revolutionary for society as a whole.
“And I am happy to be a small part of this,” Ibrahim said. “This centre will have a library, a reading room, a seminar hall, facility for counselling by experts such as doctors, lawyers and teachers. At present, it is a small beginning but we will move ahead towards fulfilling our dreams on a very large scale.”
source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Home> Jharkhand / by Antara Bose / May 04th, 2018
Passion and dedication is the key towards success. Whatever you choose to do, you must do it wholeheartedly. Winning or losing is secondary, what matters is participation.
Bengaluru :
Passion and dedication is the key towards success. Whatever you choose to do, you must do it wholeheartedly. Winning or losing is secondary, what matters is participation. This is what gaming has taught me,” says the 21-year-old Habeeb Ullah Khan from Hyderabad.
He started gaming full-time in 2014. He had to cope with studies, career and gaming simultaneously. He says, “I was part of a boot camp in Delhi without any kind of financial support. I’m glad I have made it so far.”
After he finished his B.Com, he realised that it was time to follow his passion. “My cousin used to play national tournaments. I always had a competitive spirit within me, but didn’t know how to nurture it. With help from my cousin, I ventured into professional gaming,” says Habeeb.
He started playing Counter Strike Global Offensive initially, but later chose DOTA-2.
Over the past three years he developed a team — Wipeout, which includes four other members.
He has participated in 30-40 national tournaments. He won six tournaments last year, such as Taiwan Excellence Gaming and The Indian E-Sports Championship.
He is known as ‘CLown (K)’ in the virtual world and practices 14 hours a day. Team Wipeout also practices every day whenever they are free. They maintain separate schedules for gaming and other activities.
He says, “Gaming is similar to outdoor sports. The more you practice, the more skilled you become. It involves coordination and quick thinking. E- Sports (electronic sports) is a great community where you grow as a person. There is no hectic schedule, unlike other professions.” He has learned patience, focus and anger management.
He suggests that the aspiring gamers should not get de-motivated by failures. He cites his own example and says, “My journey in the gaming world has been a roller coaster ride. I have failed numerous times, but I never stopped learning. I’m successful today because of my failures.”
Talking about the gaming field in India he says that gaming is still not considered as a career. He says, “The youth should be encouraged to take up gaming as a profession. One should not think about losing. Winning and losing is a part of life. You will always gain valuable experience. Although E-Sports does not have adequate resources right now, over the next few years it will gain momentum. It has wide scope and rewards well.”
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Lifestyle> Tech / by Ivy Chatterjee / Express News Service / April 13th, 2018
Miyan Sahab Ka Imambara in Gorakhpur sees lakhs of devotees around Muharram every year.
Not many might know that Gorakhpur, the epicentre of the Nath sect, is home to a two-century-old Imambara as well. Built with the help of Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah, the Imambara has been included in the list of places being promoted by UP Tourism.
Legend goes that once when the Nawab was out hunting in a forest in Gorakhpur, he came across a man meditating by the side of a dhuni (slow burning fire) deep in the woods.
Seeing the mystic wearing almost no clothes, the Nawab offered his expensive shawl to him as it was a bonechilling winter evening.
However, not welcoming of the move, the man, identified as mystic Hazrat Roshan Shah, threw it over the dhuni. But, instead of burning to ashes, the shawl did not catch fire at all, leaving the Nawab bewildered. Seeing his expressions, the mystic replied that the shawl was kept in the safest of places and he could reproduce it on demand. Then, the man took the unscathed shawl out from his ‘dhuni’ and offered it back to the Nawab.
Amazed at his spiritual powers, the Nawab offered him a handsome grant but Shah refused. When the Nawab insisted, Shah asked him to get an Imambara built for Imam Hussain and give some land for the Imambara’s waqf.
As ordered, Asaf-ud-Daulah granted 17 villages in Daud Chak area cash and promised to send gold and silver tazias to the saint. In a book titled Shahernama Gorakhpur, an article by Afganullah Khan notes that the land for the Imambara was handed over to Shah in 1796 and construction began soon after.
The saint died in 1805 and was succeeded by his nephew Ahmed Ali Shah, popularly known as Miyan Sahab. The Imambara came to be known as Miyan Sahab Ka Imambara. It is this name that has been included in the list of places being promoted by the Uttar Pradesh government to bring Gorakhpur on the national tourist map.
It found a mention in the ‘list of places of interest for tourism’ at Gorakhpur Mahotsava too. The government also plans to invite proposals from corporates for investment at tourist sites—including this Imambara.
With its impeccably white exterior, the grandeur of the Imambara can be seen only during the first 10 days of Muharram when azadari rituals are performed. “At least 1 lakh devotees visit the Imambara during Muharram,” says Nahid Shama, principal of a girls’ PG college run by the Imambara Trust.
Blogger Mazhar Naqvi has noted that the traditions of azadari came to the Imambara from Awadh. “Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula sent gold- and silver-plated tazias for the Imambara here from Lucknow. It is believed that the saint had promised to conduct azadari on behalf of the Nawab, and he kept his word,” Naqvi has noted in his article ‘Roshan Ali Shah and the Imambara of Gorakhpur’.
Local writer Prem Paraya stated that the estate grew manifold under the leadership of Roshan’s successors who took keen interest in administrative affairs of the Imambara and related property. “It is said that by then, the estate’s exchequer had lakhs in cash, many gold and silver blocks and a treasure of ‘asharfis’. The waqf was so wealthy that it gave a loan to the East India Company as well,” says Paraya.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> News> City News> Lucknow News / by Shailvee Sharda / TNN / April 01st, 2018
Courtallam Border Rahmath Kadai, a 40-year-old eatery opens its doors in Coimbatore
Located in the busy road of Race Course is the newly opened restaurant, Courtallam Border Rahmath Kadai. We are there for dinner. Painted white and well lit, the restaurant has two floors and we choose the first floor as the ground floor was packed, and we go up a flight of wooden stairs. Red kolam and mirror works decorate the walls and there are old-fashioned glass lanterns hanging too.
The menu is South Indian with several chicken, quail, prawns, fish and egg. The chicken lover in me is already happy.The restaurant is known for its border porotta and poricha kozhi. We order the same to start with. The food is served on banana leaves with no delay. The porotta came with chicken gravy and the poricha kozhi is red and I love the strong whiff of coconut oil. The dish is mildly spicy and the meat is tender. We also order chicken kothu porotta and a generous portion of it arrives with a lot of onion and curry leaves along with soft chicken pieces. It is one of the best I have had so far.
Pichi potta pepper chicken fry is spicy, and the shredded chicken is again redolent of coconut oil, onion and pepper. We then dig into the idiappom, gun chicken (so named because the piece looks like a gun!) and a masala kalakki that is an egg dish. I particularly like the masala kalakki as the egg is gooey and cooked perfectly. The small pieces of cinnamon, pepper, cloves, onion and cardamom add to its flavour.
Satiated we climb down the stairs and meet I.Mohammed Asan, Director of the restaurant. He tells me, “My grandfather started the hotel as a small eatery at Courtallam for lorry drivers 40 years ago. Then it served only tea, porotta and chicken gravy. It was known as Border Kadai as it was situated on the Kerala- Tamil Nadu border. Tourists to Courtallam began flocking to our eatery for our border porotta. The one in Coimbatore is our sixth branch. We have four others in Chennai.” Their speciality is the fact that they use country chicken from their farm in Courtallam and the masala is homemade. “We are particular about maintaining quality.” They faithfully follow the recipes of his grandfather and cook the biriyani and gravies in firewood stove. “It is the traditional way and helps to lock the flavours better.”
As I make my way to the parking space, I see people waiting patiently outside for their turn to get a taste of their food.
Info you can use
Courtallam Border Rahmath Kadai is open from 12.00 noon to 11.00 pm.
Indian-origin star Aziz Ansari became the first man of Asian origin to bag the title of best actor in a TV series (musical/comedy) at the Golden Globes.
The 34-year-old won the trophy for his role in Master of None .
“I genuinely didn’t think I would win as all the websites said I was gonna lose,” Ansari said.
He was up against Anthony Anderson of ( Black-ish ), Kevin Bacon ( I Love Dick ), William H. Macy ( Shameless ) and Eric McCormack ( Will and Grace ).
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Life / PTI / January 07th, 2018
Markazu Saqafathi Sunniyya (Sunni Cultural Centre) led by Kanthapuram A P Aboobacker Musaliyar has decided to adopt 100 villages in the country as part of the 41st anniversary of the institution.
Dr Wael Albattrekhi, deputy head of Palestine embassy in India, inaugurated the programme held at Markaz on Wednesday. He stated that Markaz’s activities have been incredible as the institution carefully engages the marginalised communities in the country.
Kanthapuram handed over a cheque of Rs 1.5 crore to orphans at the function. In his address, the Sunni leader said Markaz had spread its activities to 22 states decades before to improve the living conditions of poor people. Now, Markaz has extended its activities by adopting 100 villages as part of as part of the mission’s focus on educational and humanitarian activities, he said.
Sayyid Zainul Abideen Bafakhi Thangal launched ‘One Million Notebooks’ project and Chennai district judge Zakkir Hussain inaugurated the smart village project during the occasion. C Muhammed Faizy, the general manager of Markaz, delivered the keynote address.
Besides providing food and shelter to the residents, Markaz will impart education and training in the 100 villages with the intention of changing the status of villages. Markaz also will supply one million notebooks and other educational equipment to underprivileged students. As part of Markaz Orphan Care Project, 5000 orphans are being given financial aid.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> News> City News> Kozhikode News / TNN / April 19th, 2018
Danish Siddiqui and Adnan Abidi were part of the Reuters team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography announced on Monday.
A Rohingya refugee after crossing the Bay of Bengal. | Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
A sun-burnt woman sinks to her knees on the shore, fatigued and forlorn. In the distance, a group of men unload the meagre belongings that they have carried with them in a small boat as they have made their way across the Bay of Bengal from their homes in Myanmar to the safety of Bangladesh.
This striking picture is the work of Danish Siddiqui, one of two Indians in the seven-member Reuters team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for their series documenting the violence faced by Myanmar’s minority Rohingya community and their mass exodus to Bangladesh starting from August 2017. The prestigious awards, given out by Columbia University in New York, were announced on Monday.
“A photo should draw people and tell them the whole story without being loud,” Siddiqui told Scroll.in. “You can see the helplessness and the exhaustion of the woman, paired with the action that is happening in the background with the smoke. This was the frame I wanted to show the world.”
Adnan Abidi was the other Indian in the team that won the prize. The other members of the Reuters team were Mohammad Ponir Hossain, Soe Zeya Tun, Hannah McKay, Damir Sagolj and Cathal McNaughton.
The Rohingyas, who are mainly Muslim, have been fleeing their homes in Rakhine state for several years, alleging that they are being discriminated against by the government of Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Myanmar maintains that the Rohingyas are illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.
The exodus in August was prompted by an intense campaign of violence in Rakhine. Myanmar’s military said that it had launched “clearance operations” against Rohingya militants. It denied that civilians had been targetted.
Smoke is seen on the Myanmar border as Rohingya refugees walk on the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal, in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh, in September 2017. Photo: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
Complete chaos
Siddiqui was one of the first international photographers to be sent to the field at the outset of the crisis. The photographer had been on vacation in August when he saw the crisis unfold on the news channels. “I told my editors that I wanted to cover the story and within 48 hours I was on the first flight from Mumbai to Dhaka and then to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh,” Siddiqui said. “Since I was one of the first wave of journalists to land up there, there weren’t many restrictions, and I was permitted to even click pictures in no man’s land.”
Siddiqui spent around three weeks in the coastal villages of Bangladesh and in refugee camps. “It was completely chaotic,” he recalled. “Fishermen were carrying the refugees illegally from Myanmar to Bangladesh. The boats off coast were not going on the jetty and were landing in the middle of nowhere. Since the waves were really high, the boats were toppling and some people even died. Most of them were so traumatised. What they told me was that nobody should witness these kinds of things in their lives. For them, the first priority was to get food and water for their family.”
Adnan Abidi said that the situation was frantic. “Everybody was in pain,” he said. “We knew it was our job to shoot, but I did not want to randomly go in and click pictures. So I spoke to them and then started shooting. Everybody has lost everything and were living in a 10 by 6 plastic sheet for shelter.”
Abidi spent about 15 days in Bangladesh between late October and early November. “I have worked at Reuters for over 14 years now, but this is the most challenging story I have done till now, including the Nepal earthquake” of 2015, he said.
Rohingya refugees scramble for aid at a camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh September 24, 2017. REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton
Right place at the right time
Each of the 16 photographs in the series portray a different aspect of the vast human tragedy. A great news photograph, says Siddiqui, the result of both knowledge and chance. “You have to be at the right place at the right time,” he said. “It is also important to know the history and culture behind a place. You need to also know the history of the conflict. And in cases like these you have to do research on the monsoon waves. But again, news photography does not involve too much planning. We must think of what the readers want to see.”
Behind Abidi’s picture of a young boy bearing a scar, there is a Rohingya translator’s presence of mind, the photographer said. “I was very tired that particular day and was having tea at a small dhaba in the camp when my translator Mohammad Farooq noticed that this kid had a scar,” Abidi said. “I quickly went to them and spent some time with them. The father explained that the seven-year-old boy had been shot on his chest.”
The picture speaks volumes. “I decided that I did not want to show the face of the kid and instead show just his chest and the father’s hands because that image says everything,” Abidi said.
Mohammed Shoaib, 7, who was shot in his chest before crossing the border from Myanmar in August, is held by his father outside a medical centre near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh November 5, 2017. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi.
A story to tell
But not everything can ride solely on coincidence, the two photographers noted. When Abidi was in Palong Khali, near Cox’s Bazar, there was an influx of more than 3,000 refugees across the Naf river on November 1. Covering such sudden events needs quick thinking, Abidi said. “We could see a thin line of people crossing the river from around 2 km away from a village,” Abidi said. “So we walked to the river and when we reached there the light was really good. But there was a guard standing at the bank of the river who did not let us go inside to shoot. We pleaded with him to not send us back. He finally let us in and we kept shooting till 11 in the night.”
For Siddiqui, the biggest challenge was physical. “We had to sometimes walk hours to get to a point,” he said. “One day I had to a climb a mountain and walk for six hours barefoot, with leeches on my leg. But you could see that the refugees are also coming from the same side. As a journalist you want to be strong in front of them because I had to tell their story. They should feel that connection with me. If they see me walking by with a bottle of water before them, it will not be nice. You have to be like them.”
Rohingya siblings cross the Naf River along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border in Palong Khali, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on November 1, 2017. Photo: Adnan Abidi/Reuters
The seven members of the Reuters team each spent about two weeks in Bangladesh on rotation. “We had photographers from different language backgrounds from Bangaldesh, India, Northern Ireland, Britain and Bosnia,” Siddiqui said. “We had a complete story. We also had pictures from the other side in Myanmar as well, which many don’t. Also as a [news] agency, we are very fast and work on getting raw emotions in a photo.”
The rotations helped the photographers cope with emotional exhaustion, Abidi said. “I followed around this kid who had lost his father and was living with his mother and eight siblings,” he recalled. “This kid was taking care of his family. There were people from NGOs and religious communities who were distributing food and money at certain camps. This kid used to follow them for many kilometers and knew where to find them just to get supplies for his family. A week of following the boy broke me down and I then decided that I could not shoot after that.”
Rohingya refugees are reflected in rain water along an embankment next to paddy fields after fleeing from Myanmar into Palang Khali, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh November 2, 2017. REUTERS/Hannah McKay
Finding new eyes
Siddiqui hopes that the Pulitzer Prize will attract new attention to the tragedy. “I just hope that this award makes a positive difference in the lives of these refugees,” he said. “I hope through these pictures and recognition, more people would get to know about the problem. Because it is not over yet. The crisis is not over yet. These makeshift camps are built on muddy hills which are prone to landslides when the heavy monsoon starts.”
Adnan Abidi (left) and Danish Siddiqui.
Siddiqui added that his field experience had opened up his mind to the various narratives about the Rohingya community and its displacement. In August 2017, the Indian government announced that it was planning to deport all 40,000 Rohingya refugees living in the country, telling the Supreme Court in an affidavit in September that the refugees posed a “serious national security ramifications and threats”. The Supreme Court did not allow any deportations.
“How the narative in India is played out is totally different from what I saw on the ground,” Siddiqui said. “You do not know what is happening unless you are on the ground. Another big takeaway was how too much nationalism can destroy a community of more than one million people. The narrative in Myanmar is totally different. When I went there I could see how helpless people were. They had to fight for a bottle of water. Reading news reports on the crisis was completely different from being on the field and experiencing it first hand.”
source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> PhotoJournalism / by Sruthi Ganapathy Raman / April 18th, 2018
Naiyer Masud. Photos courtesy of Muhammad Umar Memon
Muhammad Umar Memon, who has translated Naiyer Masud’s stories, on the labyrinth of his fictional universe.
Naiyer Masud (1936-2017), who passed away in Lucknow on July 24 at the age of 81 after protracted illness, was one of the greatest Urdu short story writers who has been extensively translated into several languages, including English, Finnish, French and Spanish.
Masud was born on November 16, 1936 in Lucknow. His parents came from families of physicians (hakims). His father, Syed Masud Hasan Rizvi Adeeb, was a professor of Persian at Lucknow University and a famed scholar of dastaan. He was the elder brother of noted Urdu satirist Azhar Masud. In 1965, Masud joined Lucknow University as a professor of Persian where he remained till his retirement in 1996.
Masud’s four books of short stories — Seemiya (The Occult), Itr-e-Kafoor (Essence of Camphor), Taus Chaman ki Maina (The Myna of Peacock Garden) and Ganjifa (Card) — cemented his reputation as the master of the unsaid who created a maze, a labyrinth in his stories that held the reader captive to their narrative wizardry, their illusory spell.
Masud also translated a few short stories of Kafka as well as some Persian stories into Urdu. He also wrote critical and biographical accounts of Mir Babar Ali Anees (1803-1874), Yagana Changezi (1884-1956) and Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869). He was awarded the Padma Shri for Literature and Education in 1970. He was also honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award for Urdu in 2001 and the Saraswati Samman in 2007.
In this interview, critic and short story writer Muhammad Umar Memon, professor emeritus of Urdu literature and Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has translated Masud’s stories into English — (The Occult, Penguin Books, 2013) and Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories (Penguin Random House, 2015) — talks about Masud’s enchanting fictional landscape. “His fiction invites you to enjoy the labyrinth for what it is and, if possible, become it — something like the complete fusion or identity of the observing subject and the observed object,” says Memon. Excerpts from an interview:
SHIREEN QUADRI: In Naiyer Masud: Collected Stories (Penguin Random House, 2015), you mention about your first encounter with Naiyer Masud’s fiction in the late 1980s and how you were stunned by Seemiya, his first collection. You talk about his stories as “fragments of consciousness suggestive in their fractured imagery of some presence somewhere in the beyond”. Could you share your initial impression of this encounter and how it has evolved over the years?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: That first impression, which I perhaps share with most of his readers, persists.Take, for example, some images that occur with rare economy of description in most of the stories of Seemiya, but only in fragments, revealing a little of themselves at each occurrence, such as the ubiquitous lone fragment of the mysterious cloud, the curios mentioned in passing in the opening story, “Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire”, and then repeated with additional details in practically all the others, with their relatively detailed treatment in the third story, “Snake Catcher”; or the young woman fleeing from the sexual advances of the narrator which is touched upon lightly in the first story, then again in the third, but occupying a substantial part of the fourth and eponymous story of the collection where her flight ends in drowning. More tellingly, however, it is the opening paragraph of “Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire” and its verbatim retrieval as the closing part of the last story, “Resting Place.”All this creates an overwhelming impression of some sort of inherent interconnectedness and of what lies in between as somehow being an organic part of a continuum. Yet all five stories of the collection preserve their autonomy. While they do not yield any sense of spatial or chronological continuity, or closure, they do leave the reader with two dominant impressions: that (1) the author is dealing with a continuum, and (2) it can be viewed only in fragments.
What stunned me was the deliberate attempt of the author to suppress the links that would — or, might — have restored the fragments to their logical place in the continuum. The resulting jolting effect makes it difficult to grasp the ultimate meaning of the work; perhaps the reason why one is hard pressed to articulate for oneself or explain to others with any degree of confidence and precision what a given story is about — what it means.
Nor can one dismiss these stories as so much mumbo jumbo and move on. They just don’t let you move on. They haunt you. You are hooked. Nothing like this arresting quality is seen anywhere in Urdu fiction, where you are completely taken, without knowing, ironically, what has taken you.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Masud’s four collections of stories — Seemiya, Itr-e-Kafoor, Taus Chaman Ki Mayna and Ganjifa — establish his reputation as possibly the greatest Urdu short story writer. He has been variously described as a “realist of the strange” (by Amit Chaudhuri) and as a “poet’s storyteller” (by Agha Shahid Ali). What place do you think he occupies in the legions of Urdu writers whose works have been embraced and appreciated by the wider world?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: I’m not sure about the perimeters of this “wider world”. Do you mean the territories of South Asia or the whole world? Frankly, I don’t think too many Urdu fiction writers have received much recognition outside the South Asian subcontinent. They became known mostly on university campuses with departments of South Asian Studies after some of their work became available in translation, but not among mainstream Western readers. I think Saadat Hasan Manto and Naiyer Masud are comparatively better known outside South Asia. Essence of Camphor, one of the two books of Masud’s stories I published in the US, received many good comments in Kirkus Reviews, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and numerous other US newspapers and magazines, and was later translated into Finnish, French and Spanish. But I doubt it sold more than a couple of hundred copies in the US. As for within South Asia, Masud is generally considered the finest Urdu fiction writer today, without progenitor or progeny.
The Vice President, Mohammad Hamid Ansari presenting the Saraswati Samman Award 2006-07 to Dr. Naiyar Masud at a award function organized by K.K Birla Foundation, in New Delhi on March 05, 2008.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Seemiya, a collection of five interlinked stories, which you translated into English (The Occult, Penguin Books, 2013), is more like a novel in stories. They have no discernible plots, their terrains are unidentifiable, the characters that inhabit them have no names. While these stories are autonomous, they coalesce in unexpected ways, with certain images recurring in more than one story. Tell us about your understanding and appreciation of his first collection which, in many ways, cemented Masud’s reputation as a master of the form?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: I have already given some idea of both my appreciation and the tenaciously illusive nature of The Occult in the answer to one of your previous questions. However, let me add a little more: The jolts that throw the reader in a vortex of incomprehensibility are the result of paring down to as much as one-tenth the draft of a work from its original length. Why does he do that? Two examples, in his own words:
“(1) Once a thing is brought into existence, it continues to live in some form or fashion even when it is removed from the scene. For example, you are sitting on this sofa; you then decide to get up and leave. You are not on it anymore, and yet your presence will be felt, to some extent at least, however obscurely or intangibly. But that other sofa, just brought in from the store, on which no one has yet sat, cannot be the same as the one you had sat on. It is necessarily different. One cannot describe this difference in words, but one can feel it, subliminally.
(2) There was this woman who was an accomplished cook. A certain dish that required only four ounces of ghee she’d cook with two-and-a-half pounds of ghee, removing the extra when it was done. But the dish tasted very special and retained the flavour, the essence of the finest dish from the table of the nobility.”
What he tries to do, then, is to retain the aura of the excised portions in those that he does keep. Never mind the suppression of details pertaining to the event being described, something reminiscent of their erstwhile existence will be felt in the retained parts. His job is to craft a language which will convey this veritable existence in its equally veritable absence. He elaborates it further: “Take, for example, the phrase ‘nisvānī badan kī khushbū’ [scent of a woman’s body] or ‘qadmoñ kī āhat’ [the sound of footfalls suggestive of a presence]. They occur once or twice in my work at most, yet nonetheless seem to pervade it.”
Muhammad Umar Memon
SHIREEN QUADRI: Masud’s fictional landscape is like a labyrinth. In the introduction to Collected Stories, you write that his stories seem to pull the readers into the centre of a vortex — at once provocative and inaccessible. You wrote: “Even while failing to understand his stories, one is unable to walk away from their haunting ambit. Somehow they seem to retrieve for the reader a part of their memory buried deep in the liminal folds of consciousness otherwise preoccupied with the more immediate problems of mundane existence.” For a reader, what is the best way to approach Masud’s stories?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: The “best way” is also indicated in the continuation of the passage you have quoted, viz., “It is a part that needs to be discovered, patiently, more through feeling and introspection than by reason. The moment reason is engaged, what it sees is a formidable scrambling of logical coordinates, always leading back to the same labyrinth, never reconstituting into a discernible [and complete] entity.”
You see, although one could say, everything, however ineffable and vague, carries a sub-stratum of “meaning”, meaning ultimately has to do with “ego”, the desire to grasp and be done with the claustrophobic labyrinth, not to dangle permanently in a worrisome state of incomprehension. But what is the meaning of an object d’art, a painting, a symphony, a nocturne? Why can’t we enjoy it for its own sake? Let it generate its diverse epiphanies in the reader’s imagination. For it is emblematic of nothing beyond itself, and so is Naiyer Masud’s fiction. If we continue the quest for meaning, it would be like the attempt to get out of the labyrinth, while his fiction invites you to enjoy the labyrinth for what it is and, if possible, become it — something like the complete fusion or identity of the observing subject and the observed object. I might also add here that it is the limitation of any grouping of written words with their inevitable consecutiveness that raises our expectation, the necessity for it to have meaning. If somehow a story such as “The Colour of Nothingness” could be converted into a painting, with all its events simultaneously present on the surface of canvas, would we still approach it with the same expectation of meaning as we would in its written form?
SHIREEN QUADRI: What is your mental portrait of Masud based on your interactions with him over the years? Could you trace for us the world Masud came from and how it influenced his fictional landscape?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: I’ve met him only once, by accident, in Delhi, for a few hours, in the company of his friends. It was difficult to talk to him much, certainly not about his work. My only contact with him was through correspondence and occasional telephone calls. I have no mental image of him except when I think of him during the last half a dozen years of his illness, the painful image of a bedridden, frail man who had gradually severed his contact with the world sails through the mind. He had stopped writing altogether during this period, whether due to physical inability (the stroke had more-or-less paralysed his right side) or, even if he could write, he was determined not to. I do have a theory about it, but it is difficult to articulate it with clarity. Perhaps a kind of affront to his pride compelled him to deny the world all those scintillating gems he could have given it, to get even with Providence in as incomprehensible a way as unfolds in his fiction. He was a very gentle person, a paragon of rare subtlety and what we call “sha’istagi” in Urdu, who hurt no one, extremely reserved, immensely confident but least demonstrative of it.
That said, what I have gathered of his background is common knowledge. He grew up among books and in a cultured family. An extremely well-read man who was keenly aware of the sophistication and achievements of his native Awadh, in arts, in sports, and everything in between. Bygone Lucknow — once palpably real — was now a place in memory. Even in stories which are not time-and-place-specific, their locales nevertheless are redolent of the aura of Lucknow — in the dilapidated wall of a building, in a crumbling mihrab.
SHIREEN QUADRI: How were Masud’s stories received by the Urdu world and his contemporaries?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: He was writing already from his early years, but he didn’t publish anything until 1970s. “Nusrat” was his first published story. It came out in his friend S.R. Faruqi’s literary magazine Shab-Khoon. Interestingly, when he gave it to him to look at, he didn’t say he wrote it. He said he had translated it. I do not recall Urduwallahs taking much notice of or getting excited about his stories initially. Once I asked S.R. Faruqi what he thought of Masud’s work, his reply left me dumfounded. “They don’t go anywhere,” he said. (In a way, it was a very intelligent, indeed a very perceptive remark: not going anywhere yet making the pursuit worthy of every effort was precisely the point).
All this changed with the publication of his first collection (Seemiya). Now everyone in Pakistan and India was talking about him, I mean the Urduwallahs. Critics, such as Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman, Muzaffar Ali Syed, and Safdar Mir praised his work in newspaper columns, but they didn’t venture a formal critical assessment. It appears they were smitten by his style. Anyway, today he ranks as the foremost author of Urdu short stories. Without a doubt, his is the most original voice in Urdu letters.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Masud is among a clutch of writers who broke away from the conventions of Urdu short fiction — the linear development of the story and the sequential structure of the plot — and charted a new path: the abstract. The social realism of Progressives (Manto, Chughtai, Krishan Chandar, Rajinder Singh Bedi et al) and the symbolism of Modernists (Surinder Prakash, Balraj Manra, Ghyas Ahmad Gaddi, Joginder Paul, Balraj Komal et al) gave way to mimetic realism, the new way of capturing the multi-faceted reality which reflected that post-1970 Urdu writers had a more nuanced, complex notion of reality. Kafka, whom he also translated into Urdu, had a great influence on Masud. Could you talk about what possibly shaped his fiction and gave it a new direction?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: While one’s background and milieu may play a part in shaping the character of his writing to some degree, style, ultimately, is the result of an innate element of one’s personality. The circumstances of Ghalib’s life are well-known. Could someone else have with identical circumstances produced Ghalib’s kind of poetry? Background and milieu cannot account for the imaginal world and ways of a writer, nor could this illusive “element” be explained rationally.
A man of undemonstrative feelings, Masud had deep roots in and intimate knowledge of the vanished culture of Lucknow, most clearly visible in his story “The Myna from Peacock Garden”. But even in stories where the locale and time is deliberately obscured, the details and ambience betray his intimacy with that culture. This is as much as one can say. What, however, unfolds within the confines of this knowledge is pure imagination, a working out of one’s unique personality and illusions and what have you.
However, in his several dozen letters to me, he often names Ghulam Abbas as his main influence, while many others (Azim Beg Chughtai, Rafiq Husain, Kafka, Poe, Emile Brontë, Dostoevsky) may have worked only as models. Kafka’s influence on him has been often grossly overrated. Although he thinks that Kafka and Poe have a lot to give, he is not sure whether he has consciously come under their influence. Let’s just say that Masud has consciously followed Ghulam Abbas and creatively assimilated Kafka. Whatever he learned from these writers helped him craft a style uniquely his —a style which is as deceptively simple as it is hard to imitate.
SHIREEN QUADRI: You also wrote somewhere that Masud’s narratives work as a reminder against completion and closure. In a very interesting analysis of his stories, you wrote once that in Masud’s stories “one experiences things in dynamic movement, not as objects with fixed perimeters, in a state of repose or quiescence. So one cannot be done with them and move on. Circularity has no terminus. Finishing one of his stories does not bring the expected comprehension and completion. What it does bring is a continual engagement with the unsaid and the ineffable, preserved in memory. It is like walking into a well-maintained living room, but no one greets you. You wait for hours, but no one appears. And you cannot leave because you vaguely feel a presence that you cannot see or name.” Are Masud’s narratives also a reminder against the quest for meaning? How deeply are they also enmeshed in dreams and disillusionment?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: Dreams — yes; disillusionment — with qualification. In fact, his very first published story “Nusrat”, according to his admission, is a transcription of a dream he had. Disillusionment is a fact of life, any life. So, to that extent, it is there in his stories. But it has nothing to do with the author’s disposition or pathology. Masud is mature enough to not allow disillusionment to become a dirge of what once was and is no more. When the word “morbidity” or “decadence” is used to characterise his work, he vehemently takes exception to it. He knows how good that culture was and it is a shame it didn’t last, but he also knows that one must move on to the future and its teeming possibilities. Thus, a fictional recapitulation of that culture is merely a recording and not an act of mourning.
As for completion and closure, answering just this question in an interview, he expressed his dislike of the dramatic ending, adding,
“Even as a child I found it repulsive. A story’s end shouldn’t be dramatic. Which means the story should not give the impression that it has ended, that all is finished and done with, that nothing remains. The other reason could be that even after I’ve finalised a story, I seem to want to continue writing it, or if not it per se, then a fresh one along much the same lines. […] I do intend for my story to give the feeling that it has not ended, that rather what has ended is the specific episode around which it is woven. Although the short stories in Seemiyā were not written in the sequence in which they appear in the book, they illustrate my point well. You will notice a particular connectedness, a certain coherence and affinity flowing through all of them.”
SHIREEN QUADRI: Your contribution to the promotion of Urdu works has been immense. A professor emeritus of Urdu literature and Islamic studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, you have translated numerous works of Urdu fiction, including the works of Masud. You also served as editor of the Annual of Urdu Studies (1993-2014). Tell us about your association with Urdu literature. Who are some figures of Urdu literature you admire?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: Well, as a Memon from Rajkot, my mother tongue is Memoni and/or Gujarati, but I was born in Aligarh, where my father was a professor at the university, and grew up among Urdu speakers. I always loved Urdu, but I wasn’t thinking of a profession in Urdu. I did my graduate and post-graduate work in Arabic and Islamic Studies. After a Ph. D., I was offered a joint appointment in two separate departments at the University of Wisconsin to teach Arabic in one and Persian in the other. A year later, I was offered to take over Urdu as well and move to one department. I gave up teaching Arabic. Since then I have worked only in Urdu, but I have taught courses on Islamic religion and culture, literatures of Muslim Societies, and Sufism throughout.
Who do I admire? In fiction, surely some of the writers I have translated. In criticism: first and foremost, Muhammad Hasan Askari, next, S.R. Faruqi, and, finally, Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman.
SHIREEN QUADRI: What memories do you have of Aligarh, where you were born, and Karachi, where your family moved to in 1954? Tell us about some of your early literary influences.
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: Plenty. And the memories of Aligarh seem to be more real than those of the ten years I spent in Karachi. The funny thing is: whenever the image of Aligarh flashes across my mind, the place seems to exist in its own independent space, without even a tentacle stretching into India or Pakistan. In a way, it is more real than the two countries. It is my “Toba Tek Singh.” I haven’t been to Aligarh since 1954 and I’m dying to visit it before my time is up. But politics has a way of thwarting even the most innocent wishes. Even though I’m a US citizen for over 30 years now, I couldn’t get the Indian visa.
Anyway, being the youngest of six children, five of whom having already left Aligarh, I grew up with a father half a century older than myself and always absorbed in some book, I went through a lonely and uneventful childhood and always carried a vague feeling of some unnamed sadness, which has dogged me throughout my life. I did have some friends though. I played the games then common among Indian boys (cricket and gilli danda), stole mangoes, guava and other fruit from university orchards on the way back from school, and enjoyed swimming. So, it was just another ordinary life. I went through many of the same boyhood and adolescent experiences as
other boys.
Out of my entire fifteen years in Aligarh — excluding a few summers which we spent in our ancestral hometown Rajkot in Kathiawar, Suarashtra (the same place where, I believe, during the waning days of the British Raj, the Ali Brothers spent some time in jail on sedition charges), where my parents owned a house — the nights of 1947 stand out in memory. Partition took place while we were summering in Rajkot. When the time came for us to return to Aligarh, my mother stayed behind because of a scheduled minor foot surgery. On the way back, Father left my sister and me at the Delhi railway station and went to attend a meeting in the city which had been planned earlier and Abul Kalam Azad had insisted that he attend it. My father thought a railway station would be safer. My sister and I rode a rollercoaster of veritable fear during those two or three hours alone on the railway platform.
Later we took the train to Aligarh which arrived safely, but we subsequently learnt that the next one did experience some trouble and a few lives were lost. I said, “the nights of 1947”. Although communal incidents were relatively few in the university area, our neighbourhood on the fringe of it lived in constant fear of a sudden attack and had therefore mounted a big searchlight atop the roof of Manzur Sahib’s house, which is where we were to gather in case of an assault. One morning we were awakened in the wee hours and rushed to Manzur Sahib’s. It was a brutally chilly night. I recall I was shivering down to my bones. There was no time to put on anything warm. An overcoat was just hurriedly thrown over my sleeping clothes and off we went, with me still in my slippers. Luckily the night passed without any incident.
As for my early literary influences, well, none, or if there were any, I was not conscious of them. In Aligarh, I enjoyed reading children’s magazines, Khilona and Phulwari and, later, detective novels, such as Ibn-e-Safi’s monthly Jasoosi Duniya and Imran series. Reading of literature didn’t begin until we moved to Pakistan. I did read a lot of books and even wrote some stories, the idea of becoming a professional writer was far from my mind.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Your latest translated work, The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told (Aleph, 2017) brings together the works of 25 Urdu writers who are masters of the form, including Abdullah Hussein, Asad Muhammad Khan, Munshi Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto, Intizar Husain, Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Rajinder Singh Bedi and many others. In your wonderful introduction, you mention that their stories carried within them “the embryo of some of the future developments of the form”. What triggered this collection and what were your overriding concerns behind their selection?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: You seem to think that the book was planned, that there was a conscious design behind the selection. At the risk of disappointing you, the story is far simpler. Selection, while it may appear to be the result of a conscious act, is, for me at any rate, merely a reflection of who one is, and it takes a while to evolve into one “who one is”. From that point forward, selection is merely following a course predetermine by one’s nature and personality. It just happens. You don’t have to be conscious of it. I never translated a story that I didn’t like, and I never translated a work to meet the demands of a definite publishing project. I didn’t care whether a translation ever got published. This is the reason why I find it difficult to design a book according to the demands of a publisher. The credit for The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told really goes to Simar Puneet, my editor at Aleph. It was her idea and gentle persuasion that made it possible, with my part in it being very little. I only selected stories from my published work and revised them.
SHIREEN QUADRI: What are you working on next?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: There is no next, not in English anyway. After retirement in 2008, I decided to stop further translation into English. Half a century in the US had slowly affected my ability to write proper Urdu. Henceforward I will do all my work in Urdu, I told myself. I have since written very little in English, except for a few columns for the Karachi-based newspaper Dawn. When R. Sivapriya, a former editor at Penguin, asked me to translate Manto, I remember my initial reluctance to accept her offer. She persisted, I gave in.
In the past nine years, I have translated into Urdu a variety of writing from Arabic, but mostly from English: about a dozen novels, a few short stories, a work on Sufi metaphysics, articles on the nature of Islamic culture in al-Andalus, Islamic philosophy, etc. Currently I’m collaborating with a friend on translating a book about the nature and myths surrounding the transmission of Greek science and philosophy into Islamic civilisation and Islamic contribution — grudgingly acknowledged, if at all — to the making of the European renaissance. The work is proving to be quite arduous as it involves advanced mathematics and astronomy. So my courtship with English now appears to have effectively ended, although I might revise some earlier work and reprint it.
SHIREEN QUADRI: Who are some of the contemporary writers in Urdu (poets, novelists and short story writers) we must watch out for?
MUHAMMAD UMAR MEMON: This is a difficult question. I really haven’t kept up with the Urdu fictional production in the past two or three decades. There are, of course, many new writers, but I haven’t read their work critically to make any predictions about their promise. Although among the older contemporaries Ikramullah, Asad Muhammad Khan, and Muhammad Salim-ur-Rahman are quite well-known to Urdu readership; their work needs to be introduced to a much wider reading public. In poetry, however, I will mention two names: Asif Raza and Riyaz Latif. Their work breaks new ground and is indicative of an entirely fresh poetic sensibility in Urdu. The former lives in the US and the latter was also here until recently. I know them personally and have enjoyed reading their poems immensely. Luckily, Asif and Riyaz write enviably good English and have translated their poems into English. I hope they will be published soon.
source: http://www.thepunchmagazine.com / The Punch Magazine / Home> Interview – Profile / by Shireen Quadri / July 31st, 2017
Humra Quraishi at Hyatt Regency’s TK’s restaurant in New Delhi Photo Sushil Kumar Verma | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma
Humra Quraishi mulls over her long friendship with the Dagar family
She’s had the courage to live in and report from the violence torn Kashmir Valley, but the memories of grief stricken mothers and orphaned children leave her struggling for weeks after she returns to the Capital. When you meet Humra Quraishi, journalist and author, it’s not difficult to figure out how come she’s such a combination of the hard and the soft. She’s the lady in whose home meat has always been cooked, but who doesn’t taste it beyond the shorba (gravy), and who “can’t see raw meat”.
Meeting us at TK’s, the Oriental cuisine restaurant at the Hyatt Regency in South Delhi for lunch and a chat, Humra, she who has lived alone in a conflict zone, is nervous! Because, comfortable as she may be with the pen, she says she’s no good with chopsticks. But never mind. Chef Amit Rohilla, who has designed the new menu for TK’s, has everything under control. Not only are there forks available for desis like us, he also has a line up of vegetarian delights for our guest.
True to her varied colours, Humra’s two latest books are from two ends of the spectrum of human experience. While one is a coffee table book on the Dagars, known as the first family of Dhrupad, the other is a novel, “Meer” (Rupa) set amid the Kashmir conflict.
As Chef Amit personally sees to the dishes being cooked at the live grill fronting our table, the conversation shifts between the melody and malady of human existence. That a novel should have eventually emerged from her years of covering Kashmir is not surprising. But a history of classical music and musicians?
“Dagars & Dhrupad” (Niyogi Books) is the result of a relationship that began over three decades ago. “I heard them (the Dagar Brothers) in the early ‘80s in the home of the ambassador of Qatar to India,” she explains. Remarking she’s not an expert –– “not on anything” –– Humra says she nevertheless found it was “something that touched your soul.”
She began meeting Ustads Faiyazuddin and Zahiruddin Dagar at their residence in Delhi’s Nizamuddin. Over the years, in that simple, welcoming flat, she met various members of the clan spread over different parts of the country, and a number of newspaper interviews were published.
“One day I was clearing all my papers. I thought, I have so much material, I could do a book. Then I asked Wasif (well known vocalist Ustad Wasifuddin Dagar, son of Faiyazuddin). He said he would have to ask his mother.”
A plate of vegetable yakitori, with tri-coloured bell pepper, cottage cheese and onion, accompanies this warm tale of a close knit family. Not only did the ustad seek a go-ahead from his mother, his sisters and his students too, he left the author free to interact with them. After all, as she points out, “Once you do a book you have to look at all possible details.” However, she adds, “The forte of the book is the pictures.”
The entire family, says Humra, beginning with the elders Faiyazuddin and Zahiruddin sahab, have an air of affectionate simplicity. “They didn’t seem the sermonising type. I’m not into frilly things. And they never gave the impression they were top musicians. Then it took off,” she recalls of her easy friendship with the family.
The ustads explained the music to her and their manner of speaking and “rahan-sahan” was “very simple”, so she became a part of this large hearted family.
Like music, cooking too is a technical subject but also intimately related to the emotions. As with music, so with food, Humra reacts with the heart.
The vegetable gyoza with chili yuzu dressing is delicious, particularly because of the serving system at TK’s, where customers choose the ingredients from a counter and watch the dishes being prepared right at the table. The aromas and smoky air are reminiscent of a family kitchen.
At home, mentions Humra, she is happy with her “very basic U.P.-type khana.” Hailing from Lucknow, she says besan ki roti, bhindi ki sabzi and a bowl of kadhi…these are “the ultimate” in culinary ecstasy.
Meanwhile, seared cottage cheese, broccoli, asparagus, snow peas, with Thai basil and coriander sauce vie for attention alongside Okonomiyaki pancake, tonkatsu sauce and wasabi aioli. One more superb dish served up by the chef is Kaki-age (shredded vegetable tempura) sushi roll.
TK’s also offers an array of non-vegetarian dishes which have recently made it to the menu: There is Lat ma kai chicken, Oriental Wasabi prawn, chicken tsukune, among others, but we are happy with our choices.
Humra has dedicated the book to Begum Mehmooda Dagar, Ustad Wasifuddin’s mother, because without being a performer, she has been the mainstay of the family.
As for that adage about a family that eats together, it certainly applies to the Dagars too.
The author relates a charming tradition that remains unbroken, by which, after any concert or function (including the launch of this book), everyone comes home to have dinner, no matter how late the hour.
When Humra protested that it would be difficult for her to get home, she was told she would be escorted, which she duly was.
Music, food and love. The perfect chord!
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> MetroPlus > Table for Two / by Anjana Rajan / January 13th, 2016
