Live! Urdu Sha'eri and Discussions on Twitter

Twitter is a microblogging service that is used pretty extensively around the world--and by Urdu-speakers and -lovers everywhere. And a lot of people post poetry on Twitter. And there's some very interesting baetbai fun and translation work on there as well. We are placing an RSS feed of what happens on Twitter below on this page.

Enjoy!

And remember; hit reload to get new material:

Technorati tags applicable to this post: Urdu - India - Pakistan - Culture - Language - Web 2.0

Urdu TechNews اردو ٹیکنالوجی اخبار

From Qadeer Ahmad Rana, Editor of Urdu TechNews اردو ٹیکنالوجی اخبار, we hear that because of the BlogSpot ban in Pakistan, Urdu TechNews has moved from urdutechnews.blogspot.com to to http://urdutechnews.wordpress.com.

For readers who are not familiar with it, Urdu TechNews اردو ٹیکنالوجی اخبار provides technology news, reviews, articles, downloads, links, etc in Urdu language (yes, written in the Urdu script).

Technorati tags applicable to this post: Urdu - Technology

Az Karachi asth, Radioyay Azad; Relaunching Azad Karachi Radio

About a year ago, I had started podcasting. I, we, rather, started two podcasts. One was in English and was, well, podcast, via the RSS feed for this blog while the other was in Urdu and podcast as "Azad Karachi Radio".

To which a lot of people go..."Say what?!" Are you talking about the political independence of Karachi, a la Singapore?

Well, let's explain.

Both of the members of the team working on the podcast count the city of Karachi as our emotional, intellectual and social wellspring. And thus the idea is to have an Azad--the word, say, Gandhi would have used, for "free"--voice that has a Karachi accent and speaks with the spirit of that brave city.

Thus the title of this post: Az Karachi asth, Radioyay Azad.

That phrase is my uneducated way of saying "From the heart of Karachi, this is Azad Radio". PaRhay lik-hay koe Farsi kya hai, پڑھے لِکھے کو فارسے کیا ہے؟ , as the old line of poetry went; educated people should be able to grasp complicated ideas in literary language--which, before Europe became ascendant, was Farsi, from Istanbul to Rangoon, if not further.

Another reason--and this might be a very personal eccenticity of mine--the phrase from Persian pops into my head is that, growing up abroad, my father used to listen BBC Urdu (as well as English and Hindi) regularly. And if you didn't turn the radio off fast enough at the end of most Urdu broadcasts, the next thing you heard on that wavelength was "Az London asth, Radioyay BBC" (From London, this is BBC Radio). So in my head, Urdu, Radio and the traditional roots of Urdu come together in that one sentence. And it took me decades to actually learn what the words exactly meant.

So, to paraphrase the call sign of BBC's Persian Service, az Karachi asth, radioyay azad. Cemendtaur and I are reviving Azad Karachi Radio with Program 4, a year after the last one went online.

This program restarts the discussion with Cemendtaur joining the team live and in studio. This program congratulates celebrants on Ramzan, Eid and Diwali, with some thoughts on the spirit of the season; discusses the first anniversary of the earthquake in South Asia and the role of the blogosphere in helping remember those in need; and throws out some political thoughts on matters of social concern, also discussing the
recent exchange between a seminarian (madarasa student) and Gen. Pervez Musharraf that made the rounds on the Internet.

The audio file for directly downloading and listening to the fourth program is here. You can now also stream the podcast using the Odeo (odeo/5e510de8d8638707) player from any Azad Karachi Radio blog page.
Just take a look at the top righthand corner of the page!

The new edition of the podcast is at:

http://azadkarachiradio.blogspot.com/2006/10/azad-karachi-radio-program-004-october.html

And the main Blog is at: http://azadkarachiradio.blogspot.com/

The podcast is aslo available on Yahoo! Podcasts at:

http://podcasts.yahoo.com/series?s=3d848ad579b260b163d17218e7fcbad5

and on Odeo at:

http://odeo.com/channel/34582/view

Though the directories might need a little time to register the new edition--they hadn't at the time of writing this.

You can subscribe to either the text version of this blog or the Podcast using the following the following URL/link for our RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AzadKarachiRadio

and copy-pasting that address where the software you use to subscribe to PodCasts (for example iTunes from Apple, iPodder, etc.) asks you to put addresses of Podcasts you are subscribing to manually.

If you are in Pakistan or elsewhere where you have difficulty accessing the Blogspot domain due to censorship, etc., please use:

http://www.pkblogs.com/AzadKarachiRadio

Formally speaking, Azad Karachi Radio is a service of Azad South Asia, a collaborative media effort initiated by yours truly and Cemendtaur, out of Silicon Valley. You can reach the team at iFaqeer@gmail.com or leave comments on either this blog or at Azad Karachi Radio.

Technorati tags applicable to this post: Urdu - Hindi - Urdu Podcast - Pakistani Podcast - Indian Podcast - Hindi Podcast

Online Urdu Newspapers

Etemad - Hyderabad's youngest Urdu daily is already into circulation now. It is being brought out by a famous Muslim Ex-parliamentarian - Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi. Nasim Arifi has been appointed as the editor of Etemad.

Hyderabad already had three Urdu dailies - Siasat, Munsif and Rehnuma-e-Deccan. With the launch of Etemad, the quality of Urdu journalism is definitely going to improve, day by day.

Another good thing is that at least three of above mentioned newspapers also have their presence on the Internet. They can be read online on the following URLs are -

• Siasat: http://www.siasat.com/urdu/
  
• Munsif: http://www.munsifdaily.com/
  
• Etemad: http://www.etemaaddaily.com/index.htm

Aadaab,

~ Qais

Is Urdu Ready for the Information Superhighway?

July's cover story in Spider magazine (the Dawn Group's Internet Magazine) is titled "Sifting Scripts: Is Urdu ready for the information superhighway?". One of the stories, by yours truly, covers how the blogosphere is evolving:

http://www.spider.tm/jul2005/cstory2.html

It mentions this blog rather prominently.

Highlights of the whole edition, including the full articles on Urdu on the 'Net are available off the Spider web page. The other stories in that package actually do a good job of rounding up what's been going on with the Internet and Urdu. And mine gives you a flavour of how Urdu is starting to transcend borders for a new generation.

آداب	Adaab,
فقیر-i	iFaqeer

Post about "Urdu Blossoming on the Internet"

I am pretty hyped about all that is going on in this community of ours that seems to be developing around blogging in and about Urdu and the affiliated Wikis, etc. So I decided to tell the world. (Bear with me, I am not being pretentious--well, maybe a little.) I have posted the following on my own blog (iFaqeer.blogspot.com) and will be talking to a magazine/newspaper or three about publishing articles on this, and am also working on presenting the process of how to do all this and engage with this phenomenon (or just write e-mail to your mother in Urdu) at some Urdu classes and as part of a technical lecture series here in the Bay Area.

And now that I am doing or planning to do all that, I thought I would come back here and report back to those that are actually making all this happen. (I know this is being picked up by Urdu Planet and suchlike, so folks will see it. And y'all are using Firefox's RSS Feed live linking feature, right? right?) Now to the post.

----[First published on iFaqeer's blog.]

For those not familiar with it, Urdu is the language associated with the Muslims of South Asia--fully almost half of the world's Muslims. It is the language in which the madrassas of Pakistan and India operate. The official language of Pakistan, a country that needs no introduction to most readers in this day and age, it is also the language in which a great volume of literature, especially poetry, has been written--a lot of it with Sufistic content or undertones.

On the Internet, Urdu has had a presence for a while. But up to now, it has been in the form of content created using specialized software (like the ubiquitous "InPage") and then converted to a graphic format (like GIF or JPG) and then placed on a website. The content itself has usually been in the form of poetry, literature, or news and current affairs that has been created for another medium--or in another time-- and "re-purposed" for the Web. Original content creation specifically for the Internet has been very tentative; though we have had some poets use the Web as their first or main outlet and some news sites, etc. have come up.

But all that is changing. In the last few months or so, I am tracking a blossoming of Urdu language for blogging and other live discussions, and original content being developed for, and often on the web.

Blogs, of course, are where everything "is at" nowadays. And blogging in Urdu seems to have been triggered by the direct support for Urdu script that is available in Windows XP and the phonetic keyboard developed by the CRULP (the Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing at the National University of Science and Technology in Pakistan). A follow-up piece to this one will lay out the how-tos of this. Please watch this space and feel free to get in touch with the author/editor of this piece.

By way of background, this phenomenon has been preceded by the explosion of blogging in Farsi. And yes, I use that word advisedly; if what is happening in Urdu now is a "blossoming", then what has happened in Farsi is an "explosion". Farsi is reputedly now the third most popular language for online journals, and Farsi blogs are to the political scene in Iran what printed pamphlets were to revolutions in the early 20th century. But I digress. You can follow the links earlier in this paragraph to catch up on that discussion. Back to Urdu.

Here's a short round-up of things that will provide you a lay of the land, so to speak.

There is now a list of Urdu blogs:

http://urdu-ke-naam.blogspot.com/2005/05/listed-at-urdu-blogs-directory.html

The above link is to a post is from "Urdu ke Naam", a collaborative blog that includes contributions by the current author, and announces that blog's being included in the list. A closer look at that blog entry will also point to a page--on, what else? a blog--that describes how to start blogging in Urdu. And one that provides templates for setting one up.

The comments on that post above also mention "Urdu Planet", a site that aggregates the content of a lot of Urdu and Urdu-related blogs in one place:

http://urdu.zackvision.com/urduplanet/

The list of blogs that page points to is hosted on the "Urdu Wiki":

http://www.sovereign-renditions.info/urduwiki/UrduHome

For readers not familiar with them, "wikis" are a wondeful new class of websites which are great for colloboratively creating content and gathering infromation. The "Urdu Wiki" has become a good place for the community forming around this whole phenomenon of Urdu on the Web. Among other things, it has pages where the community is starting to do some of the work on developing and fine-tuning the terminology for computer usage, for example. To use another link from Urdu ke Naam, see:

http://urdu-ke-naam.blogspot.com/2005/05/technical-terminology-in-urdu.html

South Asian readers will remember that, till very recently, this kind of list was sent around as a joke, with satirical translations of Windows features into Urdu, Punjabi, or what-have-you. Now we are working on the real thing. And I do mean "we"--anyone can participate. I wish everybody would.

Which brings us to the next topic. A real encyclopedia in the language. The Wikipedia community has set up an encyclopedia in Urdu. Everyone can and should participate; it is a wonderful way to engage the Urdu-speaking community and Urdu lovers with the Internet, while helping the collection and growth of knowledge in Urdu. The address to get to it directly is:

http://ur.wikipedia.org

By way of background, here's a link to an earlier post by the current author on this topic:

http://ifaqeer.blogspot.com/2005/02/wikis-and-encyclopedia-in-urdu.html

One could see a conflict, or redundancy between the above two projects--but I dont. Here's why: One is a place for collaboratively developing content about Urdu and related topics, while the other is a real encyclopedia about anything and everything (or aims to be, anyhow) in Urdu. A project that, to my knowledge has not successfully been carried out since before colonial times.

To give you an example of the kind of discussions that are starting to happen as the use of the language starts to mature in its use on this medium, see the following posts on "Urdu ke Naam":

http://urdu-ke-naam.blogspot.com/2005/05/urdu-speaking-wikipedia-users.html
and
http://urdu-ke-naam.blogspot.com/2005/05/on-being-saahib-e-zubaan.html

Before I close, a few specific observations:

The community I am talking about spans India and Pakistan. Which, IMHO (in my humble opinion), is a good thing. It is good for the health of the language and intellectual strength of the community using it, as well as for world peace. The interesting thing is, the only tensions that arise in this online community do not arise out of national differences, but about things like the strong feeling amongst some users that the Urdu script should be the only one used for such discussion. (See the comments under the main post at http://urdu-ke-naam.blogspot.com/2005/05/genres-of-urdu-poetry.html and then the current author's own post at: http://urdu-ke-naam.blogspot.com/2005/05/blog-post_11.html)

Secondly, from where I sit, the discussion of just a couple of years ago about whether Urdu is on its way out in India (see, for example, the 2003 article on Chowk that has been making the rounds on e-mail again recently) is moot. Some of the most passionate members of this community are currently based in Hyderabad, one of the historical "homes" of the language.

Another interesting thing is that the diaspora of Urdu speakers and lovers around the rest of the world is the furthest behind in this regard. Most people one talks to around Silicon Valley, for example, start the discussion with a "but I can write Urdu now, in InPage (a software for desktop publishing in Urdu)". When, after a few minutes of explaining that what is being talked about is exactly that one now does not need specialised DTP software and can employ the Urdu script anywhere in their day-to-day computer use, you can practically see the lightbulb go off above people's heads. What follows is requests for "how to" and so on.

And lastly, an expression of humility. I write this piece not to take credit for any of this, but to pay homage. The people in the trenches, doing the real work, are people like Asif Iqbal, father of the Urdu Wiki mentioned above; Danial, a blogger in Karachi; Umair Salaam, who makes a rather credible claim to have started the first blog in Urdu; Qais Mujeeb and Manzoor Khan, founders of "Urdu ke Naam"; Qadeer Ahmad Rana, the 19-year old student in Multan, Pakistan who finally scolded and shamed the current author into learning how to write in Urdu. (Wish him luck, he's in the middle of exams now.) Heartfelt khiraaj-e-thehseen and nazrana-e-aqeedhath to them. For these are the "Asathaza", the founding fathers, as "hamaari zubaan" moves into a new medium.

PS: Shapar86, my apologies for writing another piece in English, but I really wanted to reach an audience outside those that are already set up to read and write in Urdu.

آداب	Adaab,
فقیر-i	iFaqeer

NCPUL: Serving the Cause

Though I have mentioned it before – in one of the earlier articles, I believe NCPUL deserves more visibility and attention, for the good work it’s doing in the cause of Urdu.

National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language, or NCUPL, is a government body under Ministry of Human Resource Development, Govt. of India.

The Council is involved in various activities like: Seminars, Book-fairs, Grants, Urdu education, etc. It is doing a good amount of Research and Development, too. And, it also has big names with it as its Resource Personnel, including scholars and govt. officials.

Keeping up with the technological advances, the Council is taking pains in making Urdu an IT-compatible and IT-friendly language. The program is called Urdu Technological Mission. This effort, I am sure, will go a long way in keeping the language popular and active in the coming days, when a good amount of communication would take place electronically. Also, the language will gain more visibility over the ubiquitous Internet.

All this, just for Urdu – we call it Urdu ke naam :-).

For more information, check out the website: http://www.urducouncil.nic.in/.

Wikis and an Encyclopedia in Urdu

I just found a wiki in Urdu:

http://www.sovereign-renditions.info/urduwiki/UrduHome

It also provides information about blogging in Urdu. For those who are not following this, there is a very large community of bloggers in Farsi/Persian--it's a largest single community in one language besides English or something—and it will be wondeful to see people blog more in Urdu, too. The languages are very close in script and other such technicalities, so we should be able to build on their achievements.

BTW, I never tire of saying this: The Wikipedia community has also set up an encyclopedia in Urdu. Everyone can and should participate; it should be a wonderful way to engage the Urdu-speaking community and Urdu lovers with the Internet and help the collection and growth of knowledge in Urdu. In case you want the address for that directly, it is at:

http://ur.wikipedia.org

(Here's a link to the entry on my personal blog on this topic.)

Adaab,
iFaqeer