Thursday, July 20, 2006

Mumbai Blasts; A Shairana Response


DNAIndia has the text of a nazm by Jawed Akhtar about the Mumbai bomb blasts or, more generally, terrorism:

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1042659


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Monday, July 10, 2006

Qasmi: Kaun kehtha hai kay mauth aayee tho marjaa'oN ga...

[Photo courtesy Urdu Manzil and Syed Saghier Ahmed Jafri]
As we say in Urdu, the man has passed on from the material, ephemeral world. But the poet and his poetry lives on, and helps us live on. Probably one of the most quoted couplets in Urdu about this very matter, one that captures the matter as few have done before, in any cultural and literary tradition, is from Janaab-e-Qasmi himself, who said:
kaun kehtha hai kay mauth aayee tho marjaa'onga
main thoe dharya hoon samandhar main uthar jaa'onga
or
Who says that when death comes, I will die away?
I am a river and into the ocean will I flow away
The Wikipedia article on Qasmi Saahab can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Nadeem_Qasimi
Of course, in this day and age, where a lot of us go to express our grief and share our loss is the Internet. There are now quite a few websites where one can find Urdu poetry and pictures of Qasmi Saahab. Here' a selection:

From Amjad Sheikh, we get:

Poetry of Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi Marhoom in his own voice. including his famous poem Pathar:
http://www.urdulife.com/mushaira/poet.cgi?anq_ahmed_nadeem_qasmi
And in Unicode (meaning it is written in Urdu and easier to read, and you can make it bigger, etc. like you would English text), we have:
http://tinyurl.com/rsyob

You can also read selected poetry by Qasmi Shaib at
http://www.urdulife.com/forum/index.php?showforum=65
On a personal note, I just noticed a post on the BBC Urdu blog from Musaddaq Sanwal, someone I knew, as they say, in another life:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/urdu/2006/07/post_12.html
And from the UAE, Syed Saghier Ahmed Jafri Saahab and Urdu Manzil send the picture above and the following links for poetry:
http://www.urdumanzil.com/adab_nama/allmi_mushaira/index.html
http://www.urdumanzil.com/adab_nama/qasmivisit/index.html
and photographs:
http://www.urdumanzil.com/adab_nama/pics/photo-10.html
http://www.urdumanzil.com/adab_nama/pics/photo-14.html
The post on Pakistaniat: All Things Pakistancan be found at:
http://pakistaniat.wordpress.com/2006/07/11/ahmed-nadeem-qasmi/
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