My poem . . . Meri Mazboot Aasaab Waalee Class Fellow recited by me on YouTube. An experimental Urdu poem I wrote recently . . . the graphics I have used are those of two fashion models and a picture of Indian Artist Amrita Sher Gill . . .  these women are not connected in any way to the fictional narrative developed in my poem . . .  Talat Afroze, 8th August, 2021.

I wrote this poem as feelings of despair welled up within me about the social barriers between men and women in today's Pakistan . . . Being brought up in Lahore, Pakistan and having lived in Lahore for the first 25 years of my life (1959-1986), I look back at my boyhood and my days spent in Lahore as a teenager and then a young guy and I cannot help feeling that the separation of the sexes added a lot of trauma and pain to my life in those days. Even though my school had co-education from Nursery/Kindergarten grades all the way up to Grade-11 or Senior Cambridge (Cathedral High School, Mall Road) and my M.Sc. years at Quaid e Azam University were in a co-educational setting, the society at large had many barriers to the free mixing of young men and women. Any legitimate romantic relationship was taboo even if no physical interaction was involved. Some of the images I have used in this video of my Urdu Poem may offend some or many Pakistani young men and women. I sincerely apologize for this: it is not my intention to offend the feelings of my fellow Pakistanis. The images I have used in this video were necessary to bring out the ideas I am talking about in my poem. The images used involve a husband and his wife enjoying the monsoon rain from the window and the balcony of their flat.

I wrote this Urdu song many years ago and have now uploaded a video containing my narration of the song.

میَں نے یہ نظم اپنے طالبعلمی کے زمانے میں لکھی تھی جب میَں فورمین کرسچئین کالج ، لاہور میں پڑھتا تھا۔ پھر اِسی نظم کو ایک گیت کا روُپ بھی دے دیا۔

I wrote this Urdu poem during my student days at Forman Christian College, Lahore (1975-1978) and later transformed this poem into an Urdu song.

Gum Shudaah is an Urdu poem I wrote in 2017. I am uploading here a recent recording in my own voice of this Urdu poem. To make a video of my recitation, I have used selected photographs from my childhood days, to my youth and all the way to my present middle age. 

Waapsee is a poem I wrote in 2010. For this video of my recitation of Waapsee, I have tried to use images of old neighborhoods in Lahore, Pakistan.

The opening image is a photograph I found on a Facebook group account (facebook.com/lahore.gardens) about Lahore and it shows a family (unknown) sitting in their inner courtyard (sehan).

The next photograph is of a flat in Dyal Singh Mansion on Lahore's Mall Road where artist Amrita Sher Gill used to live in the 1940s.

The last two photographs (courtesy of Liaqat Vains) are of my ancestral home at 35 Nisbet Road, Lahore where I spent the early years (1959 - 1962) of my childhood. This house belonged to my grandfather, Khawaja Mohammad Sadiq Pumpaan Waalay who migrated from Amritsar (August, 1947) where he used to own a small steel foundry for moulding steel pipes and his workmen used to drill into the ground to install these pipes and hand pumps for pumping water in the houses of Amritsar and surrounding villages. 

I belong to a Kashmiri family. I was born in my Naanee Maan's home in Misri Shah . . . this was a beautiful small house with a large grape vine growing in the small courtyard.

My parents (Khawaja Mohammad Shafi and Begum Ishrat Shafi) lived in various rented apartments in Lahore: I once estimated that we changed 10 apartments in 10 years, starting with our first rented accomodations in Krishan Nagar in 1963, then moving to another Krishan Nagar apartment (1964-1965; Waheed Raza Bhatti's family's house), to Samanabad (1966-1967), to Lohari Gate/Koocha Peer Shirazi (1967-1968), to 15 Lodge Road, Old Anarkali (1969-1970), to Saanda Road near Riwaz Gardens (1971), to Beadon Road (1972), to 15 Temple Road (1973) and ending in my father buying a portion of a large house at Temple Road, Lahore.

My parents named me Javed Shafi but my grandfather (Khawaja Sadiq) objected after a year or two citing astrological reasons and re-named me Talat Afroze. Upon settling in Toronto in 1997, I decided to launch my web site Dareechah in 2010 to popularize avant-garde modern Urdu poetry (Majeed Amjad, Munir Niazi, Fahmida Riaz, Parveen Shakir, Ahmed Shamim, Sarmad Sehbai etc.). I also started a facebook account named Talat Dareechah-Waalaa in 2010 to promote my web site Dareechah and to spread modern Urdu verses around the world.

یہ گیت میَں نے زمانہ ءِ طالبعلمی میں لکھا تھا ۔ ۔ ۔

This is an Urdu song I wrote in my student days . . .