Back in my screenwriting days at Burka Avenger (when it hadn’t yet gone public), we used to have these long-winded meetings where we would discuss the plot, individual scenes, gags, dialogues – basically the whole episode.

These meetings comprised entirely of people with a severe Urdu handicap ... writing a show in Urdu.

Someone would suggest dialogue that made perfect sense, and had all the intended effect in English. However, being that it was an Urdu show, we were hard pressed to translate it with the same sentiment.

We were so alienated from Urdu that nobody in the entire group knew the right sound that the letter ق makes. A case of 'blind leading the blind' it was.

Invariably, someone would get frustrated and burst out along these lines: “Urdu is such a limited language” (this said in English of course), purely because they did not have an inkling of how Urdu worked. I have seen people get into a fit of laughter because someone used a common Urdu idiom; it was like meeting entitled tourists.

Needless to say, the language is in a crisis. Specifically, it is the lack of interest in its preservation which is disturbing.