New beginnings

Here is a couplet Dr. Bashir Badr.

कोई फूल धूप की पत्तियों में हरे रिबन से बँधा हुआ

वो ग़ज़ल का लहजा नया नया न कहा हुआ न सुना हुआ

Here’s a translation in English:

A flower, leaves seemingly like the sun, tied together with a green ribbon,

The poetry here is very new, never before seen, never before heard of.

You can continue reading the rest of the poem here.

Note that the word ribbon used here is the same word that he used in his urdu ghazal. This word is an adapted word. Badr, a professor of urdu and a doctorate in urdu literature would have surely known that the “pure” word would have been फ़ीता (feeta), but it is difficult to argue that it will invoke the same imagery. The shock of the language switch beautifully breaks away Badr’s sher from the contemporary shayars of that time. He audaciously makes a bold move and indeed demonstrates how new his poetry is.

With this beautiful sher, I would like to introduce you to my new blog. This blog will be many things! But most importanly, it will be new, never before seen, never before heard of!

Why a blog?

I recently started to feel that I had a lot to say but did not take the time to write it. It’s not that I want anyone in particular to read it, but I really wouldn’t mind if they do!

But why a new one?

Some of you might know about an old blog that I used to run. I used to host it on wordpress which is an ad-supported blogging platform. This is something that I do not subscribe to philosophically, and I would really like to have all of my content for free.

Also, I want to be able to write in markdown, which is much more easy to type in than the unwieldy rich-text format over there. This means that I can just write a blog post in my favorite text editor (which undoubtably is vim).

Technological stuff

Currently, this blog is hosted on my github. That still does put it under the mercy of the giant Microsoft. But it’s still an improvement over capitalizing over my innoncent audience.

This blog is run using hugo, which is a nice open-source toolkit to generate static websites such as this one. Currently, this means that adding comments under my blog is not possible. I might be able to fix this in the future by perhaps relying on an external functionality like utterances. But right now, if there is any feedback on my blog posts, you can write an e-mail.

Soon, I will have a mailing list, RSS/atom and the usual shenanigans.