Javed Akhtar expresses his love for Urdu language at Faiz Festival 2023

Indian lyricist, and screenwriter Javed Akhtar, talked about his love for the Urdu language, its purposes, and poetry during Faiz Festival 2023 on Saturday.

A good piece of poetry and writing should be effective in expressing what the poet wants to say since the goal of creating poetry is to interact with the audience and everything else follows, Javed stated in the session titled Jadunama, which was moderated by Adeel Hashmi.

The Faiz festival takes place over three days from February 17 to 19 and will feature international delegates from different countries and their artistic, literary, and musical endeavors.

Javed continued by referring to the purity of language as nothing more than a fantasy. Language continues to become more varied by incorporating terms from different dialects.

He emphasized that at least 25 new terms would be added to the English language each year by the Oxford Dictionary. The “so-called guardians of language” in our situation continually eliminate terms from our language and label them as alien. In this sense, language would continue to shrink.

He used an excerpt from Urdu as an example, highlighting terms from Arabic, Italian, Punjabi, Persian, Turkish, English, and Japanese among other languages.

He declared that he was pleased that Urdu was his native tongue, as opposed to all other major languages, whose poetry had its origins in temples and churches.

Urdu, he said, had always been secular because it was opposed to fundamentalism, religious thought, superstition, and atheism, at the very least.

“The original name of Urdu was Hindvi, and when everything was separated during partition, Urdu was pushed to Pakistan since it was a language and could not be divided.”

The act of reading and collecting books, according to Javed Akhtar, is more personal than other forms of communication in the age of videos and audio.

The event features more than 60 activities, including theatrical productions, dance shows, literary readings, Qawwali performances, and much more.