Dear "Books & Authors" …

It's nice to have a magazine like yours (a lot of your stuff is awful but there are some good pieces in it, too!) that 'caters' to a reading public. The size of the public can be assessed by the size of your mag … so it is truly a tribute to DAWN that it hasn't pulled the magazine off.

One expects, however, that the Editor of Books & Authors will ensure that the Urdu often printed in it is ok. Today's Kaatibs know little of that language. Typing the right keys on the keyboard isn't enough. Also, like most of our current teachers in schools, they know poor Urdu and even less of Poetry.

My daughter, Ragni, was told by her KGS Urdu teacher when she and her classmates didn't want to borrow badly printed Urdu books from the library - specially when they were reading interesting and well-designed work in the English books - that they would "need to know Urdu - because how else will you talk to your servants".

Neither do our book publishers! Take a look at the popular Urdu series by OUP here, now used in several schools, and you'll see how bad - even awful - the Poetry section is. Some of it is even put in by the teacher who couldn't find good poems from anywhere — and she can't write poetry to save her life. Other publishers are much worse.

In today's edition of your magazine (Print Version, of course, because the Net Version doesn't show the Urdu parts), Intizar Husain, in his Literary Notes' Poets of their times (what a terrible title … but that's what newspapers do!) wrote about Urdu Poetry.

It is imperative that you should have looked at the quotes and made sure that they were correct. The shayr I am referring to is Mir's (not Mayyar's).

The second misra' has been ruined beyond belief by the kaatib. Imagine those who are new to poetry reading this and using this second misra' in their conversations.

Please, Editor saheb[a], do pay attention in the future. Or let someone who understands Urdu do it for you. It's very important. It's our National Language, just in case you've forgotten.