Arey Larkay!

harish:

he was indeed a man of `quiet grandeur`...very low key and unassuming...who had charted a course in his mind and followed it physically to the best of his ability...one of those rare individual who know the price and value of their object of interest...

heard the sad news past midnight on Geo ( a karachi-dubai based network)...M read my mind...said `you won`t be able to sleep till you write,`...so i searched the net and checked out his books...abiyaat and jadeed takhleeqi adab in four or five volums and the compilation of his columns as khama b`gosh and some other ghalib related magazines...this was around 1 am local time...then i made a decision to leave a proper obituary for others...and wrote from the heart...if it intrigues the reader in you enough to wish that i should have written more about him..then in a sense my work is done...go and find out more about him if you are intrigued....(remember your bombay poems?...i had to make an effort to `understand` some of those references;))

asif mian:

jawabun wohi sha`er paRh liji`aye jO hum nay #4 may dar`j kya hay

rgds

t

temporal miyaaN, you said:

This was in early eighties. I had just returned from a long and exhausting trip all over India and Pakistan. I had met, photographed and tape recorded interviews with leading Indian and Paksitani Urdu authors and poets.

A write-up about your adventures would be most desirable and interesting...

am:

the portraits are resting safely in some cubes on a shelf...35mm colour slides...the tapes..about 40-50 of them...signed and dated by them for authenticity...are on another shelf...several kind folks have been after me to translate and edit them...

fik`r e ma`aash, ishq e butaan, yaad e raft`gaaN
dO din ki zindagi may bhala kya karay koi

...reluctantly i agreed to do one...the conversation with ismat chughtai...have transcribed it finally on paper...now have to translate it into english, then edit and add background material...when done you will see them here first...have you met her?...what a remarkable lady...to listen to the tapes you need time and you will have to visit the baithak in TO...how good is your hindi/urdu?

lve,

t

just read this...will share with you

Two different teams of the Private Library and Archival Survey Project (PLASP) in Pakistan have now visited some fifty collections in several cities and villages of the country’s three major provinces....

Most prominent among these are the literary archives of Mushfiq Khwaja, a rare document collection that happens to be unique in South Asia both in volume and value. Mushfiq Khwaja, the universally respected veteran scholar of Urdu literature, has now in principle consented to the public exposure of some of his jealously protected literary documents. Haq met him in late September along with Anwar Moazzam who is leading the Urdu Documentation Center in India and who happened to be in Pakistan at the time.

More HERE

t,

Wish you had a more fleshed out piece. This seems too impoversished an obit for a man of such quiet grandeur. MAy Amina be at peace.

It is humbling in a very peculiar way when we run into real value, and find it oddly at odds with most of the things one immediately connects to value. I have always been moved, yes, but I often feel that such people leave me with a kink in my heart. What is it that allows some to smuggle their dignity, despite an entire life, while so many get into the the business of flaunting their scars to justify boorishness.

HN

t - it`s always a pleasure to meet people like Mushfiq Khwaja above. I`m sorry I didnt. I`ve met his siblings in spirit though and always went away with an expanded heart (that sounds weird, but it feels right).

btw, what did you do with all those tapes and things? I`d love to see them some day.

--amrita.