An end of an era! For those who have seen Ashfaq Ahmed sb on tv in the nineties, only they are the ones who can tell what a loss it was. It is a sad day in the history of Urdu literature. But people, Urdu literature started its slow death from the beginning of this century. You might think, why is it important to worry about Urdu anyway? Well language actually means history and culture. The culture that we are losing every single day.
They say that the “history is the propaganda of the winning party”. Let me elaborate, only if you have seen Mirza Ghalib (an Indian drama in Urdu in which Naseer Uddin Shah plays Mirza Ghalib) would you know the kind of man he was, what were the kind of problems that we, as a nation were facing back then. How and why it all happened? So if you don’t know Urdu, you are missing on a lot of stuff that was written by a lot our own people back then AND in the first 50 years of Pakistan! (If you are the kind of a person who gives a damn about your own roots and history then stop reading right now cause you are wasting your precious time.)
Now what is happening is that our children are reading stuff that was written by a whole different world. Whether or not its true is regardless because it is indeed “propaganda of the winning party”. Does it make any sense?
Don’t blame the government and the teachers now. We as parents need to wake up to this. We are more proud of our children learning the western things that we have forgotten who we were! We were classical people with quality tastes and values. We used to have educated sense of humour (Moin Akhtar, Anwar Maqsood …) We stopped promoting our legends instead we are ok with our kids with Western education. And there is nothing wrong with western education, I am just raising voice to losing our own ways. “Kawwa chala hans ki chaal … apni chaal hi bhool gaya..”
Do you know that there is only one poem of Iqbal in the O Levels Urdu? I mean we are literally raising a generation who might never read shikwa/javab e shikwa!
Thay tau aaba who tumhaare hi magar tum kya ho?
Haath par haath dhare muntezir-e-farda ho!
I bet your kids are more aware of J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown then ANY of our Urdu writers.
Just something to think about …