An Urdu Translation of a Kiran Desai Novel by Talat Afroze

I am a big fan of Kiran Desai's style of story telling ... I am working on an Urdu translation of Kiran Desai's first novel, "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard."

A Brief Biographical Sketch of Kiran Desai (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Kiran Desai (born 3 September 1971) is an Indian author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize^[1] and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award.[

Kiran Desai is the daughter of Anita Desai, herself short-listed for the Booker Prize on three occasions. She was born in Chandigarh on 3 September, and spent the early years of her life in Pune and Mumbai. She studied in the Cathedral and John Connon School. She left India at 14, and she and her mother then lived in England for a year, and then moved to the United States, where she studied creative writing at Bennington College, Hollins University, and Columbia University.

Her first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and received accolades from such notable figures as Salman Rushdie.^[4] It won the Betty Trask Award,^[5] a prize given by the Society of Authors for the best new novels by citizens of the Commonwealth of Nations under the age of 35.

 

Who Silenced Progressive Writers, Thinkers of Pakistan?

 A facebook friend opined on his facebook timeline that famous Pakistani fiction writers Mumtaz Mufti and Ashfaq Ahmed were worse than the Latin American drug lords El Chapo and Pablo Escobar. Here is my reply to this statment, where I explain that it wasn't just Mumtaz Mufti and Ashfaq Ahmed or Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi or Fahmida Riaz or Faiz Ahmad Faiz or Habib Jalib or Qamar Yurish (labor leader whose book of pen sketches, Yaraan e Maikada, mentions how he and others were tortured by the Pakistan Establishment) or Mohammed Aslam Muznib or Hassan Nasir (revolutionary poet, Sec. General Communist Party of Pakistan who was tortured to death in 1960 on General Ayub Khan's direct orders) but in fact all leading Pakistani thinkers, poets and fiction writers, non-fiction writers (historians, political analysts, political cartoonists) who were silenced by the Pakistan Generals who have been ruling Pakistan since the 1950s with the help of a brutal cadre of spy agencies, secret operatives, torture cells to the extent that in the Pakistan of 2017 we have university professors abducted in broad daylight from an Islamabad campus, tortured, forced to sign documents accepting a liftime ban on operating any social media web site and banished from Pakistan. In modern day Pakistan, groups of fanatics openly lynch progressive minded, liberal thinking students like Mashal Khan, where political activists like Sabeen Mahmud are killed on the streets of Karachi, where outspoken lead journalists like Hamid Mir are shot 8 times by assailants on a busy road in Karachi, where Pakistan is considered the most dangerous country for journalists . . . So, it is not the fault of Mumtaz Mufti or Ashfaq Ahmed that they became silent but that of Pakistan Generals who silenced them with coercion and threats of torture . . .

Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents, which started in 1968 and was officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. 

An excerpt from Fehmida Raiz's long poem .... Kyaa Tum Poora Chaand Naa Daykho Gay?

 Mohammed Hanif wrote a novel in 2008 entitled A Case of Exploding Mangoes describing the events leading up to the suspected/alleged assassination of Pakistan's dictator, General Ziaul Haq

My Urdu language literary web site Dareechah has a web page dedicated to Pakistan's labor leader and short story writer Qamar Yurish

I urge Pakistan's political activist and poet, Yousuf Hassan to continue describing the struggles of Pakistan's Progressive Writers Movment in Pakistan from 1947 to the present time ...
What is happening to Pakistan's thinkers, writers, poets, political activists is just like Galileo's persecution by the Catholic Church ...