Ecstacy

Badly written but do read till the end.

:-) Those of my friends who 'hate linguistic people' are requested (but not really) to skip this post. I don't want them to like me less (-:

It gives me great pleasure to announce that my study of the Urdu script has crossed a few significant milestones. I have just finished reading three thrilling short stories, "Aalsi Naukar" "Andhe ka chiraag" and "Jhagade ka nateeja" and the next time I pass through Bhatkal on the bus home, I will read up all the signs from 'Best Mutton Shop' to 'the new Fashion Tailors' in Urdu.

I can write too. But not that well yet. I am still struggling to find out which s's z's and ta's to use where. I can't identify the gutturals because I am not used to saying them or writing them in Hindi. But I will get there. The writing doesn't look as neat as in the 'Learn Urdu in 30 days-national integration series book'. Of course those were printed with a special pen and I am using reynolds. But I will not give that as an excuse.

I have always wanted to learn the Urdu script, but I don't remember why. Ten years ago in school, it might have been because of my stamp and coin collection with all those stamps and coins from the middle east. It might have been from the entirely differnt look that Urdu has compared to the other Indian languages.(My mom went to Bhendi Bazaar,I think it was, in Belgaum and got me a thin book on learning Urdu. It was a difficult book to learn from and I had given up hope. Last year on a sudden inspiration I thought of the National Integration Series). Oflate it has been because of my fancy (I want to use a stronger word here but dont want to say obsession -somewhere between fancy and obsession) for Urdu poetry. The other day I got a major kick out of reading 'Mirza Ghalib -Peshkash-e-Gulzar' on the cover of the casesste I have. I remember in college of being jealous of one of my mallu friends (Rap, if you are reading this) who went to school in Quwait and was taught arabic. I remember a scene in a recent movie with Vinod Khanna and Dimple Kapadia and Deepti Naval in it (the movie was the name of a woman, can't remember which) where Vinod Khanna, a famous poet, is writing to Dimple Kapadia a beautiful letter in Urdu and his pen making those beautiful marks on paper. I remember among the first few scenes of the partition movie 'Pinjar' (based on Amrita Preetam's book) and a screen full of Urdu billboards with pamphlets in Urdu flying around in the dust. I remember wondering why Bollywood have stopped announcing Film Names in Urdu.

The day before, I was in my cubicle, intermittently getting away from the comp screen to write something in Urdu, sometimes in my notebook, sometimes in the air : 'Kaisi chali hai ab ke hawa tere sheher mein' 'we suurat-e-ilahi jis des bastiyaan hain' 'jaane ab tujhse mulakaat kabhi ho ke na ho'. (I am suspicious about the 'ho' I have written; have to look it up. Urdu is not a modular script; there are many more rules to remember and I suspect sometimes that some rules might be bent in the interest of calligraphy. I also suspect that the 'i' ke maatra and the 'u' ki maatra are sometimes dropped when obvious. You wouldnt do that in Hindi.) Then I thought of one of my fovourite half-verses 'Ghalib sariir-e-khama navaa-e-sarosh hai' (Ghalib the scratch of the pen is the sound of angels) and I wrote it down.

Sometime ago we had received a email marriage invitation by a colleague who is called Kamran. That time I had stopped learning Urdu after a small start. I read his full name on the invitation 'Kamran-nabi-khan'. Couldnt read his wife's though. Now maybe I can.

In school I had made my dad get me a book on shorthand (If not typing atleast shorthand was my illogic). I did not persist till the end where it got to the pages where they invented a compressed symbol for almost any word. But in the beginning it was a script like any other with easy to write letters. I used to think that Pittman seemed to have borrowed heavily from Hindi or any other Indian script ( Short hand is a phonetic script with a letter/symbol for every consonant or vowel sounds - a dot here means 'i', a darker dot means 'ii' a tick here means 'a' etc). Now I know that he had been inspired by the Urdu script. P,B,th,ta come one after the other in both Urdu and short-hand. Letters are hammered into shortforms when they appear in words in both)

Mir Ki Ghazal kahun tujhe main, ya kahun khayyam ki Rubaayi Someday I will learn the Persian tongue and Read Omar Khayyam in the original. Now I will read Mir.

The other day I made a near perfect TI logo. I had never been able to control my drawing like this before. I am convinced it is the effect of practising all the 'meems' and the 'kaafs'.

While writing from right to left, the question mark symbol is also flipped about the Y axis. Ha!

Next stop Sanskrit: the other National Integration Book I bought the same day - a kind of good omen I think. Then I will consolidate my Mallu script and language, then Bengali, then German, then French....Mallu and Tam becos. I already know a bit. Bengali because I want to read Tagore and Bankim Chandra. German and French maybe,maybe not. All is in God's hands.