I can sleepwalk into a library to read poetry. Pick a book and forget about the entire existence. Perhaps my heart throbs in iambic pentameters with elegies, sonnets and odes doubling up as eternal companions. I could live in a library, but they’d never let me sleep there.
Call it absent-minded coincidence or life’s largesse; I no longer need to trudge to the library. My library is a click away. The poets I love, the poems I could take an oath on are available on www.rekhta.org, the world’s largest online compendium of Urdu literature.
Available in Hindi, English and Arabic, www.rekhta.org features 1,731 shayar (poets), 17,651 ghazals, 11,897 sher, 4,334 audios, 4,127 videos and 15,482 e-books. In a grainy video, one can watch Faiz Ahmed Faiz reciting Tum nahak tukde chun chun kar Daman mein chupaye baithe ho..Sheeshon ka maseeha koi nahin, Kya aas lagaye baithe ho…, listen to Munni Begum sing poet Habib Jalib’s Dil ki baat lab on par la kaar… Shamsur Rahman Farooqi recites Ghalib and stories come alive in Dastangoi, an old tradition of story-telling.
On the website, one can pick an out-of-print Jahan Numa which was first printed in 1857. Or, the 355 e-books on Ghalib. On the website no one has to ever struggle with the word meaning – each and every word is explained. Click the word and you’ll know mukaddam is ‘above all’, taufiq is ‘god’s grace’, fasaana is ‘tale’.
Rekhta was born out of one man’s love for Urdu literature. His name: Sanjiv Saraf. An IIT-alumnus and Chairman of Polyplex, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of PET films, Saraf should have been crunching numbers and decoding the chemistry of pet resins. Instead, he talks animatedly about Urdu poetry. At 53, he learnt the Persian script and then put together www.rekhta.org .
In the Noida office of Rekhta Foundation, I sat rapt as Saraf unfolded the story of his love for Urdu, the beginning of Rekhta and its growing popularity. In the dimly-lit office, Saraf with a beard and a wanton curl on his forehead, talked of the making of rekhta.org and Jashn-e-Rekhta, an annual festival dedicated to celebrating all things Urdu.
With readers in nearly 200 countries, the reach of rekhta.org is massive. Such is its credibility that the content is now being used as reference point for scholars, researchers around the world. Intending to help preserve Urdu and making it accessible to all, Saraf is now working on adding Urdu curriculum of various universities online.
I could sleepwalk into a library to read poetry. Now every night just before sleeping, I read poems on rekhta.org. Like a devout saying a prayer at the end of the day. Now, even the conversations in my dream speak in iambic pentameters. I owe that to rekhta.org.
Preeti Verma Lal
