A Delhi artist is trying to popularise Urdu by putting Faiz and Chughtai on T-shirts
Art teacher by day and painter by night, 30-year-old Shiraz Husain wants you to know about Urdu literary figures. Not just know about them, but know them – as in, by face.
“To appreciate the language, one needs to first recognise the writer,” he said. “So instead of using abstract forms of their writings, I decided to simply sketch their faces, in their own andaaz".
And thus was born Husain’s Facebook page, the Khwaab Tanha Collective.
Husain wants young people to read more Urdu literature, but he also wants to transform the imagery of Urdu on the internet. The few times that he tried to Google images for Urdu poetry, the results were unattractive fonts, portraits of heart-broken girls with roses and tears morphed on to the images. Husain decided to do something about it. The words Khwaab Tanha translate to "a loner’s dream", an apt description of his vision, he says.