Naim, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, remembered Carnegie Mellon's 2007 Million Book project which also covered Hyderabad and said, "Regretfully, it was done in a criminal fashion."
He added that while Rekhta wasn't the first to take up this initiative, it was the one to do it with respect to old books and journals.
URDU POEM SANA SADEQI ARCHIVE
I have recently been working on crime fiction in Urdu, and was happy to see that the Rekhta archive has managed to find a fair number of these otherwise hard to find books," Naim said. I'm sure the same is done by many enthusiasts of Urdu, in academia or outside, across the world. Terming the initiative "extraordinary", Urdu scholar C M Naim said he used the website almost on a daily basis for one reason or another. ".as we progressed and as students, scholars and others started benefitting through e-books, whether for study, research or simple reading, we started receiving a welcoming response from the libraries/individuals that we contacted, and they started coming forward to share their holdings," said the businessman-turned-Urdu connoisseur. Teams of enthusiastic volunteers were sent to public and private libraries all over the country to look for books and found entire Urdu collections lying forgotten and often neglected. The initiative began small and soon mushroomed into a massive project that covered not just rare books but also all other forms, including recent books, manuscripts and periodicals that were digitised with the aim of preserving them for posterity. The younger generation, attracted to the eloquence, beauty and versatility of the language had no easy recourse," Saraf said in an email interview.
In the process, I realised there wasn't enough content or resources available on the Internet and what was available was incomplete, non credible and mostly in Urdu script. "Later, when business got established and was growing well, I stepped back from business to focus on learning Urdu. Saraf, who is based in Delhi and comes from a business family of Rajasthani origin, did all that was expected of an heir-apparent - he did his schooling from the Scindia School in Gwalior, graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 1980, joined the family business in 1984, and later established Polyplex Corporation, a multinational business in polyester films.īut the old love of listening to ghazals, courtesy his father's fondness for Urdu 'shayari', tugged at him. The mission that began in 2012 with the love for Urdu poetry culminated in July with the Rekhta Foundation digitising a colossal 1,00,000 books. And then, as he grew up, the strong urge to read the masters of Urdu poetry in the original script inspired Saraf to start learning the 'rasm ul-khat' (Urdu script).īut to his dismay there were virtually no resources available on the internet, Saraf told.
Childhood memories of listening to ghazals on vinyl records kindled love for the language.