Personal blog

Called home and was talking to father saab. He told about a recent incident in our village. A husband & wife worked in the High School there. Husband retired sometime ago and he got few lakhs as his full & final amount. Their son who is a drug addict was demanding that money from his father. He said no to any money as he needed to get the two girls married off with that money. One day his son beat him up and hit him on the head. Probably due to that he lost his mental balance and one day committed suicide by jumping in front of the train. Villagers called the boy and first he denied to come and then came well dressed wearing black goggles. While giving the statement to Police he said “I am feeling stressed now, will record my statement after 2-3 days”. ...

Read Part 1 - Punjab is a very rich state ! Punjabi music is all about beats ! Thankfully it is not. What you get to see is Bollywood’s use (use as exploiting something; i say use because Bollywood includes Punjabi songs in a movie to make the album hit not to promote Punjabi music) of Punjabi music. Far away from that adulterated stuff you get to hear there exists some beautiful Punjabi music of so many different genres including dance numbers, sad songs, spiritual poetry and so on. ...

Most of the stuff that non Punjabi’s know about us Punjabis is typical stereotyped stuff shown in Bollywood movies and Punjabi songs. Most of it is some non-sense wrapped around “balle balle” as if dancing is what Punjabi’s do all the time. So thought about doing some posts telling the reality instead of what is being shown on small or big screen. How it actually started was that once I drafted a post explaining that how in Punjab there live people of all religions, not only Sikhs as a lot of non-Punjabi’s seem to think. But this post remained in the draft for months. Then last week a colleague in office was talking about something similar. From there an idea struck me to write about multiple topics related to Punjabi stereotypes. In each post I will try to talk about one topic (or more if they are very closely related). The posts are not going to be very very detailed but would briefly talk about the subject. You can add your criticism/views/corrections of any facts in the comments section. Some of the posts might be ridiculously short but length isn’t really the important thing here. Important is to make the point about some issue that we are seeing around us. ...

If you are a fan of Urdu poetry and haven’t had a chance to read Ghalib may be it is the time to do that. Understanding Ghalib is no easy task, though. You may not the get the real context what he wants to say in the verse. That is where some translation helps. Most of the translations from Urdu to English do kill the real essence but Love Sonnets of Ghalib (Translated by Sarfaraz Niazi) doesn’t do that. I think it is the best reference out there on Diwan-e-Ghalib; at least in English. It is a must have for any Ghalib poetry lover especially people for whom Urdu is not the native language. But I am sure people having Urdu as their native language will also enjoy reading the translations. He provides with the verse translation first and then goes on to explain the context of that verse in detail. Reading Ghalib from this book has been an absolute pleasure. ...

meharbaan ho ke bula lo mujhe chaaho jis waqt, main gaya waqt nahi hoon ke phir aa bhi na sakoon - Mirza Ghalib (Turning kind towards me, call me back any time you want; I am not like the time bygone that cannot be recalled*) *Translation from Love Sonnets of Ghalib by Sarfaraaz Niazi As Mirza nausha said " ke phir aa bhi na sakoon” the year 2013 is about to say good bye and it would never come back. Personally for me new year isn’t something that grand of a celebration time but it does signify a unit of time; one more year has ended. Of course there would be many disappointments everyone of us faced in the last year but here is a chance to look forward to new hopes and opportunities in the new year. ...

Yesterday while searching for a live version of Ghalib’s ye na thi hamari qismat on Youtube came across this brilliant rendition of the same poem by Tina Sani. It is done bit differently where she picked up another poem by Daag Dehlvi and she sings one verse from Ghalib’s poem and then next one from Daagh’s poem and so on. Verses from both the poets are somewhat related to each other in terms of the emotion that is expressed. On top of that there is a brilliant singing by Tina Sani. Absolutely mesmerizing. Can it be a called a new year gift ? Yes I think. ...

Some things are just not meant to work the way you want them to. I mean no matter how much you try, you can never get some things to work. This PC that I got almost 3 years back I think is one of such items. First I wanted to buy a powerful machine with at least 8 Gigs of RAM. Problem at that time was very few motherboards supported 8 Gigs. Finally selected all the components and got it assembled. It included a very expensive Microsoft wireless Keyboard and Mouse. ...

The new ad by Google called “Google Search – Reunion” has almost gone viral in both India and Pakistan. It shows two friends, now in old age who were separated during partition meeting again due to the efforts by their grand children and use of Google search and other options in Google. What I am wondering about is what really makes this ad click ? Given that these two countries have been in a bitter relationship since almost 1947, what exactly people are liking in this video ? Are there some deeply buried emotions or this is just an instant reaction to a nicely made video ? Not trying to be an idiotic critic but just an angle that must be given a thought, at least. ...

Like most of Indians my first interaction with Reshma ji’s songs was not via Hero movie’s lambi judai song. It was rather via Radio Pakistan, Lahore. The songs like haye o rabba nahio lagda dil mera and akhian nu rehan de akhian de kol kol were already very famous and used to play regularly on Lahore Radio. But yes it was when lambi judai was recorded that she became a house hold name in India. ...

The Dussehra celebrations at the place where we live in Delhi are pretty huge. The local residents arrange a big function every year where there some local singer is called for performance and then there is burning of the effigies of Ravana. In our language there is a kind of mela where there are many stalls for different type of food, toys for children and more. Looking from the 3rd floor balcony the scene in the street looked somewhat like: ...