It is 2pm, and a seven-year-old boy sits in an after-school Urdu remedial class, his fingers tracing the unfamiliar curves of the words before him. The sentence on the page seems simple enough: “Yeh ...

Abdul Ghaffar inspects the line of Urdu I have written and then bursts into laughter. “To me, people like you who know how to read and write Urdu in normal script are padhe hue (literate). Not padhe ...

India is a country whose wonderful diversity stems from the richness of its past. That includes the Urdu script. Sitting in my university office in Paris, I was recently visited by a young French ...