Dear Rumi

Sabahat Quadri

poetry

Falling in Love with Urdu Poetry

In school, my Urdu was a widespread joke among my friends. My pronunciations aside, I was hopeless with sentence construction, which in Urdu is the opposite of the way a sentence is constructed in English. If I was to translate ‘she is sitting under a tree’ into Urdu, the correct structure would mean that it would […]

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An Unintelligible Multitude

I spent an evening with a group of teachers who were struggling with the implementation of a new style of teaching, one where subject boundaries were blurred and classwork had to be activity-based. They were teachers from my mother’s former school—where she was a teacher for 15 years—trying to make sense of a classroom without […]

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