Gone is Caravan...

Karwan gujar gaya, gubar dekhte rahey .

well not exactly, but before this Karwan disappears from view let me halt it a for a while.

hamidm2 is so right about the `Z` and ``J``. How it butchers the language..and it does not matter whether it is Urdu in dhoti or Hindi in Sherwani..it is an Indian ( as in Bharati) that gets murdered!

So those with the 1000 year khujli in their bums better not invoke the wrath of those from across the hindu Kush.

Now lt`s just see what this ``Z` and ``J`` has done to a fine (but not very refined) piece of Poetry.

GuZar: means passing.........GuJar means a milkman or a cow-herder

Ghaar: means dust-cloud.........Gubar...can be read as Gobar: cow-dung.

Now for the one who hears this poem from the Urdu-cahllenged, this is how he will understand and appreciates this an otherwise moving geet.

The herd of Cattle has passed, and all we kept looking at was the cowdung (it left in its wake).

---

The movie was made by the NFDC--Film Dev. Corp.) for a specific purpose. It was a very good, but not very subtle, attempt at quelling the student violent protests & Street-activism
``taught`` by Gandhi but was not very palatable to the then erstwhile Independented India.

This partcular ``song`` was inducted into the movie, and sometimes it seems that Neeraj was
retained so that just this song be included in the movie..maybe some bureaucrat was so
enamoured by it.

But it seems like it has been force-fed into the movie. A `situation` created for it. There was no need for this very morbid and depressing song in the movie . It created a very awkward
or rather freakish sight of Gandhi on horseback.....or a Ghaznavi in a lungi.

P.S: bj..stay away from aesthetic subjects; stick to counting money.

So, there was this poetry contest and the two finalists were an English major from Duke University and some cowboy from Texas A&M. The participants had to write a short poem within 5 minutes after being given a word. The word was `Timbuctoo`.

The Duke student got up after about 4 minutes and said:

Slowly the dusty caravan rides
Into the dusk two by two
Destination Timbuctoo

and sat down. There was huge applause from the partisan audience who just couldn`t see how this could be topped by the redneck from Texas.

The A&M guy got up almost immediately and said:

Tim and I a-huntin` went
Met three whores in a pop-up tent
They were three, we were two
So I buck one, Tim buck two.

PS. BJ, the moral of the story is: Never write anything about Timbuctoo, the desert or caravans, let alone a poem!

#35 by hamidm2

[......... i am told by my indian friends that nobody understands the television hindi news that is being forced on them by hindoo revivalists and revisionists - is it true? .......... why are they pushing this dead language?]

Dear sir, languages do not live or die, people do! And people speak what they speak. They take their liberties with the languages and they take words from all around them – words they need to express what they need to express.

Where have you been, sir?!! The times of authorities dictating what the citizens ought to speak – by controlling their media – are long past! Nobody depends on a single source for news any more and competition dictates that the news channels speak to the people in words that they understand. And the channels need not even be located in the country where they get watched.

Those controlling times are gone, gone, gone!

Gone with the wind!

Or at least gone with the windbags – the example of your esteemed grandpa comes to mind, of course!

Please rest assured. We sir, are from the land of the “koyal” or cuckoos – no matter how often you all – the lost ones on the wrong side of the border – try to pass yourselves off as inhabitants of the land of the bulbul – that bird shall forever stay a rare bird in the subcontinent – unless of the caged variety! Nature saw to that and there is not a single thing that you can do about it!

Pakistani attempts to deny the Sanskrit origins of Urdu by using a different, foreign script and by consciously excluding the local words and trying to adapt by force many other words from their native origin to an artificial Persian format are doomed to fail!

It is like denying your very own genes!

It is like a beautiful woman who is trying to pass herself off as a bearded ruffian by dressing up in ruffian-like clothes and carefully switching to the language of the gutter!

When it comes to having sex, however, such a woman has no alternative except to have it the “old-fashioned” way – the way nature intended her to! No amount of being “gay” and pretending to be a stud will work!

It never has and it never shall!

Let there be sex!

#35 Hamidm2 sahib

[....all poetry is a little gay...]

Be careful, you can be easily become the focus of the combined wrath of the poets of the world.

Which can be highly devastating.

Especially if combined with the wrath of the Rosie O Donnels of the world.

Re: # 37

Yes - but, as far as we know he was just milking the goat... not f***** it.... I mean - he had his pretty nieces for that anyway... right?.... May be BJ can confirm... :)

So pakis - you have been wasting yourselves far too long on self-defeating fantasies: 1 muslim = 10 hinood, islam is better than hinud, urdu is better than hindi, jinnah is better than gandhi, f**** a goat is a good ``right of passage``....

I mean get over it already, OK?... grow up and learn something from the hanoods... they are better than you in everything [well, except in circket :)].... I mean - how long are you going to keep your collective heads up your collective ***es?

Re: # 36

mohar,

......... i empathize with your sentiments, but at the same time i must point out that the only person i know who had a pet goat was gandhi ji .........

hamidm
[...urdu is like milk, farsi is like milk and sugar, pushto is like a donkey`s fart ...]

So which one do you speak to your pet-goat to seduce her?...urdu, the milk or pasto, the fart?.....I mean if you folks f*** a goat as ``right of passage`` - should it even matter what your ``culture`` is and language you use? :)

Any case - hindi, urdu, chinese - who cares... only language that matters is English... so you old coots should save your breaths [ and farts ] and stop killing each other over this silly old tired argument...

Tata just took over the Brit steel plant for cool 9 billion dollars... the white man is crying silly ever since Mittal took over Arcelor... First their language, next their jobs, now their plants - the hanoods are all over...

And here we have a paki goat-f***** is sitting on his hunch and pontificating on urdu and pasto... that too using his grandpa`s ``immortal`` words.... :))) I mean - how silly can you get?

bj,

......... i am told by my indian friends that nobody understands the television hindi news that is being forced on them by hindoo revivalists and revisionists - is it true ? .......... why are they pushing this dead language ?

...... in any case, i agree with krishna that ghazals ``evolved as a means of romancing little boys for buggering`` ......... all poetry is a little gay

#27 by hamidm2

[...... sorry, i didn`t know there was an actual language called hindi - i always thought it was a street version of urdu spoken by paan-walas, homeless biharis, and other riff-raff ........

....... in any case the languages of the subcontinent (with the exception) of urdu are pretty crude ......... as my grandpa used to say :`` urdul sheer ast, farsi sheero o` shakar ast, pukhto goz e khar ast`` (urdu is like milk, farsi is like milk and sugar, pushto is like a donkey`s fart ) .......... i wonder what he would have said about hindi`s obvious flatulence problem ...........]


Has it ever occured to you that your grandpa might have been a crude human being?

Urdu is descended from Sanskrit, with a whole lot of Persian and Arabic words thrown in, and written in the Camel-dung script. Like if you took English and substituted many words with Persian and Arabic, and wrote it using the Camel-jockey script.

It is a bastardized language. And if it sounds cultured to you - it figures - many of you guys being descended from unknown fathers in many cases (it is a historically true fact, by the way).

And here is another revelation - Persians and Pakistanis are considered uncultured in the section of Indian society I come from. Persians - their contribution to world cuisine has been boiled rice and half-burnt tomatoes. And their biggest contribution to literature has been the Ghazals - which evolved as a means of romancing little boys for buggering.

And you Pakis are so bloody effed up that their history starts with the arrival of Muhammad Ghori. Afghanistanis, NWFP wild tribals etc. are not even being considered here.




To a fisherman`s wife, the fishing net smells heavenly. If Hindi sounds so uncultured to you, now you know why.

#28 Aik Thought

Aik Thought sahib, thanks for the link to the song audio. I checked it and it works well on my computer!

#29 Nasah

My dear Nasah sahib, it is a distinct pleasure and honor to welcome you to this little board of mine.

I hope you enjoyed the translation – even though clearly it is impossible for ANY translation to replicate the effect that the original always has on anybody who has been fortunate enough to savor it – especially the way the late Mr. Rafi sang it.

I do not look at filmi songs in a derogatory manner. Not at all!

In many ways, people in the show biz are like janitors. They have to really work hard and they have to muster all their abilities, creative and mundane, to prove themselves on a regular basis to their employers – the vast masses who can boo them just as easily as they can raise them sky high. For every superstar out there – there are multitudes of little stars who never made it in spite of very hard work – because it gets crowded very quickly in that competitive environment.

That aside, Hindi film songs are an underappreciated commodity – as far as their impact in molding a common Indian identity is concerned. By and large the “high brow” community of writers, poets, and artists looks down on it while conveniently forgetting that the reasons such songs are commercially successful is because they can connect with the common man – where all the “high brow” stuff fails!

Hindi movie songs have helped develop a national bonding which would have been impossible to achieve otherwise. Thanks to the beautiful lyrics of many Hindi/Urdu writers, a vast number of Indians have been able to express their innermost thoughts in simple language. Even more, they have been able to identify with characters who sing (or lip-synch) those songs – and feel what such characters are supposed to have felt – a vicarious thrill which makes happy people of those who have otherwise little to feel happy about.

Hindi movie songs have brought an understanding of the Hindi language all over India in a way no regulation could ever match in success! It has helped bridge the North-South divide like nothing else could!

And sometimes, they do suggest to people new ideas which could make things better for everybody.

I think that if Pakistani men were to start treating their women with even one percent of the respect that the movie song subjects shower on their lady objects – Pakistan would become an instantaneously enlightened nation!

(Note: I say many things many times – sometimes in sarcasm, but mostly in the heat of the moment. Trying to “pin me down” based on such words is an exercise in futility – one would be going all over the place without getting any where.)

#27 Hamidm2 sahib (add-on)

[…urdu sheer ast, farsi sheero o` shakar ast,…]

Interesting quote! Let me draw your kind attention to another similar-sounding adage you may have heard:

“Aghar fir-daus bar-ru-e jameen-ast, wa hameen-ast, wa hameen-ast, wa hameen-ast!”

Would you care to guess where that firdaus-land is located?

Hint: somewhere not too far OUTSIDE the boundaries of the land of the Pure!

#27 Hamidm2 sahib

A single “j” seems to work for us – if there were a separate letter “jh” needed we would have created it as a legitimate letter in our alphabet. Obviously, it never came to that and the country and the people and the language continue to survive fine – don’t be too shocked now (and you don’t need to go running to that mai-baap Congressman Towns to ask him to slip into Congressional Records his letter of protest on India’s high-handedness in keeping Pakistani letters out of its Hindi alphabet)!

Your automatic assumption that this was an Urdu song in spite of what information was provided on the poet Neeraj using pure Hindi in his songs – that assumption of yours speaks volumes regarding the thought process of many Pakistanis!

“Because Mohammed Rafi sang it – of course, it must be an Urdu song! His name is Muslim – how could it be otherwise?”

“There are SO many words in that song which I understand – heck, I understand the whole song WITHOUT needing a translation. So, of COURSE, it is an Urdu song! How else could I have understood it?!!!”

Like many Pakistanis, you get hopelessly stuck in penetrating the superficial! You see the superficial and miss out what lies underneath.

Like many Pakistanis, you fail to see the commonality – because seeing this obvious commonality will negate the whole point of your existence as a separate country – lousy existence that it may be – and it will make your whole nation and its legions of crooks who have called themselves its leaders look very foolish for their crimes and misdeeds of the last sixty years!!

In my personal opinion, the differences between Hindi and Urdu were created artificially by individuals for achieving narrow and selfish political objectives and for dividing people! Harping on those superficial differences keeps the illusion alive in the minds of some brown-skinned desis that actually they are less brown than desis – having “originated” elsewhere!

Unfortunately for people like you, there is no possible way to physically transport Pakistan to Saudi Arabia – and in any case, most Saudi Arabians consider Pakistanis as having “inferior” genes! That leaves you like a Trishanku, hanging in between – neither here, nor there!

Languages evolve over time – those which refuse to do so will die out over time. The future of Urdu, like the future of Pakistan – lies in emulating what the Indians have been doing – not what the Arabs have been doing!

So try to be more of what you ARE – not what the Arabs were!

Things have moved along since the days of your grandpa – your grandpa who in all likelihood is a member of the generation of criminals who brought the subcontinent to its present sorry state. I see no legitimate reason for pride in such a crappy outcome – it is like somebody celebrating the “accomplishments” of Jack-the ripper!

Things have MOVED on over the last sixty years! You may have to revisit some of your yardsticks!

my dear bjks -- after this column (translated filmi poem) of yours you are not going to complain about other`s columns -- are you?.....:)

http://song2play.com/m/mohd_rafi_suman_kalyanpur_minoo_purushottam_asha_bhosle_mukesh_manna_dey-13770/nai_umar_ki_nai_fasal-32994/swapna_jhare_phool_se-422737.html