MANY of those who still speak and write in clear and precise Urdu have been saddened by the state of the spoken language, as well as the style of writing it has deteriorated into. The Urdu novel has become a mere thicker version of television serials, and almost all of them have similar themes. Gone are the days of the legendary Quratul Ain Haider, Ismat Chughtai and Intizar Hussain.

But there is something even more insidious that has crept into our sub-consciousness. Over the last many years, I have not heard a single person use the word ‘intizar’. Instead, the word ‘wait’ has been so quietly and consistently introduced into our language that every television serial and everyone, for

that matter, uses ‘wait’ whether as a verb or a noun. ‘Mein unka wait kar raha hoon’, ‘Mein neeche tumhara wait karunga’, and so on.

As if this was not enough to cause the Urdu speakers to cringe, Indian soaps have so invaded our society, style and culture, that our language, too, has become a casualty.

In Urdu, when we wish to say ‘she is worried about him’, we said, ‘Woh unke baarey mein pareshaan hain’. This has been replaced with the Hindi ‘Woh us ko lekar pareshaan hain’. How and why the ‘lekar’ crept into our daily conversation is anybody’s guess.

Living languages absorb new words. They do not make the existing ones redundant. None of these changes has added any charm or some new zest to our language. They are a pain upon the senses, and only cause irritation and a feeling of loss and sadness.

I do wish I could hear someone say in routine conversation ‘intizar’ and ‘baarey mein’ at least once again in my lifetime. Am I asking for the moon? I wonder.

Nikhat Sattar
Karachi

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2024