the urdu project

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 heart of Urdu, isn’t it? We spent a week in Delhi, in beautiful Delhi, in dilwalon ki Dilli, with its scatterings of hist...

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 edges of our worldview. Things that, at first, mildly tickle our interest, and usually just enough to earn a glance but rarely anyt...

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, Persian (Farsi), Pashto and Arabic.

While putting together this website we decided that the blog title (at the very least) should app...

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 have new additions to the team: Prateek Shankar and Jonty Paul. Prateek attended the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi, wh...

Since I had managed to learn the characters and how they joined together, I could manage to read the language fairly accurately, though very slowly. I would look at random websites in Urdu and try and read them, read Urdu poetry typed out in images on Instagram.

It was...

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 recognized the Arabic characters, and hence also all the common Urdu ones. Then I figured out which ones I didn't recognize and what so...

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 films, read poetry in Hindi by Faiz, the Urdu poet. Then I thought of how, when I was ten, I discovered an Urdu speaking friend. She...

When you see one of those imported cans of Pepsi from the Middle East, more specifically from an Arabic speaking country, it would be funny to read the label on the back. It says “Bebsi”, because Arabic doesn’t have a “p” sound. It really made me giggle as a child, but...

The whole affair began when I was working on a short documentary in Ahmedabad. It was about the naubatkhaana, which is, literally, “the room of the drum”. Here they play the naubat (a drum) every day at 7 and 11 p.m., as a tribute to Ahmed Shah Badshah, the f...