Urdu poetry is often considered synonymous with love. Various shades of love, ranging from physical to metaphysical; all the nuances of the experience of love, ranging from disappointment to ...

Every day, I call my grandparents, Nani and Nana, in Pakistan to offer some solace during their increasingly isolated situation. With all their kids and grandkids living abroad and the fear of disease ...

Saudade, a Portuguese word, is often treated as an untranslatable word. It is a word that tries to encompass the ambivalence of nostalgia. At one place, it appears to speak for the yearning of ...

Last year, some impressive works of poetry came out, in the genres of both nazm and ghazal. They not only have literary merit but are also relevant in the current political and social context. One of ...

That 300,000 people celebrated Urdu verse during a three-day festival was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India. The inaugural day of the Urdu poetry festival Jashn-e-Rekhta in ...

Bazm-e-Urdu Qatar (BUQ), established in 1959 to promote Urdu language and literature, hosted the launch of the poetry collection Arzoo ka dia by Doha-based poet Samreen Nadeem Samar. This is her ...

Note: This story was originally published in October 2022 as part of Outlook issue 'Recasting Shiva'. It is being replugged on World Poetry Day 2023 as Outlook revisits the power of poetry in a world ...

Ghalib was the preeminent Indian Urdu and Persian-language poet during the last years of the Mughal Empire. He used his pen names of Ghalib (means "dominant") and Asad (means "lion"). Most notably, he ...

If you want to make high-brow small talk at one of President Barack Obama’s cocktail parties, don’t bother brushing up your Shakespeare. Try reading Urdu poetry. As POLITICO’s Ben Smith points out in ...