The Urdu Project

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What's in a Name?

It seemed right to begin in Delhi, the home of the Urdu Shakespeare Ghalib, while making a film about Urdu. Delhi is, after all, the...

Of Bridges & Chance Encounters

In my own experience, the best things that life has to offer rarely come to us gift-wrapped. They appear as minor aberrations at the near...

Naskh v Nasta'liq (Again)

I’ve had a crazy time today finding fonts on InPage 2014, which is a word processor and page layout software for languages such as Urdu,...

This One's for the New Team

Work on The Urdu Project resumed five days ago (though it feels like its been a lot longer with the amount of ground we’ve covered). We...

Naskh and Nasta'liq

Since I had managed to learn the characters and how they joined together, I could manage to read the language fairly accurately, though...

Learning Urdu

I began by making notes. I pulled up the Arabic character set off of Wikipedia, the whole alphabet, and then did the same for Urdu. I...

Hindi is Urdu is Hindustani

We had studied the author Munshi Premchand’s stories in Hindi class in school; we listened to Gulzar’s Urdu lyrics in the songs in hindi...

Bebsi, Kimia Dates & Habibi

When you see one of those imported cans of Pepsi from the Middle East, more specifically from an Arabic speaking country, it would be...

Seeing is Believing

The whole affair began when I was working on a short documentary in Ahmedabad. It was about the naubatkhaana, which is, literally, “the...

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