I'm here to share with you a vision,
and since it's just a dream, it's a very delicious dream which I'd like to share with you.
I'm talking about Urdu Project.
It's an idea which has been conceived by Musharraf Ali Farooqi,
who is a fiction writer and a translator.
He has written novels in English and he has translated
'Dastaan-e Amir Hamza' (The Adventures of Amir Hamza) and Tilism-e Hoshruba (Hoshruba - The Land and the Tilism) into English.
Very successful translations.
So I'm very thankful to him for inviting me to join Urdu Project as an adviser.
So what actually motivates us at Urdu Project is greed.
Pure, insatiable, and I hope incurable, greed.
What we actually want is nothing less than everything.
We want everything written, in Urdu to begin with, to be available in electronic form to everyone.
So, since you know that there is a great curiosity amongst people of today,
they want to know everything about the society,
we were talking about geographical mapping,
what we are aiming at is some kind of an intellectual mapping.
So the story begins some 150 years ago.
Those of you who know the work of Arif Hasan will agree with me
that we are most fortunate that we have an Arif Hasan.
His book, 'Unplanned Revolution', is a milestone of a book.
He documents, he summarizes marvelously that part of change which happened after 1947 in this part which now constitutes Pakistan.
But it is a part of a much larger story.
That story is of the cultural, socio-economic change that has happened in the last 150 years,
this began in mid-19th century,
when, as Hamza Alvi says, there was a colonial transformation of India by our colonial masters.
So we were made part of the economy of England
as supplier of industrial raw material and food grain,
so the entire country was transformed to serve that purpose.
Ports were created,
roads, railways, public education, land system,
our judiciary, everything.
So what actually came out was a new public.
There were people who had no social mobility before all this happened.
Suddenly, there was room for mobility.
People started working in different positions,
in different capacities, as employees, or as 'thaykaydaars' (contractors), or as labourers
for the colonial masters, for the new setup.
So this created a new public which could afford something which had recently been introduced,
which is printed word.
Before that, the books were written by hand, and they were copied by hand,
so that technology of printing made people as intoxicated as we are just now when we face this technology of today,
the communication and knowledge sharing technology.
So we see that there are hundreds of people who were inspired and charged and galvanized into action.
They produced not only journalism - the Urdu journalism and journalism in other languages was born out of that.
There was a product, they could produce it - at the 400th part of the cost of handwritten manuscript.
So they were just amazed and they were excited,
so what they did was, and I'm talking about not less than thousands of people
who actually invested their lives in creating knowledge and making it accessible and affordable to people.
There was a man I would like to mention, Inayatullah Delvi, who did a lot of translations.
He translated Shakespeare, he translated Anatole France, he translated Dante, he translated Rudyard Kipling, and many others.
So there was a great greed there.
They wanted to just reach out to the world, they wanted to know where they stand in relation to the world,
they wanted to know, they wanted to recognize what they have borrowed from the world, from different societies and cultures of the world.
And they want to pay back. So they started producing printed word.
Another person who I would like to mention was from Lahore.
Munshi Mahboob Alam of Paisa Akhbar.
So Paisa Akhbar, as the name suggests, was sold for one paisa,
and the idea was to make it affordable to as many people as possible.
So what we want now is simply to make everything that has been written, either in handwritten calligraphed form or printed form,
should be made available to everyone, and not just available, it should be made accessible with zero opacity, and it should be available free of cost.
So what we actually are talking about is,
it might sound a crazy dream,
but what actually intoxicates us is to realize that it is possible.
It is possible to, first of all, put all the files, put all the remaining files of all newspapers, magazines and journals, everything, on the net.
All the books that have been written,
and I'm inspired by that essay by Orhan Pamuk, 'My Turkish Library',
he wanted to collect everything that's been written in Turkish.
So everything should be, and it could be,
and actually it must be available not only in written form, not only in electronic text, but also its oral rendering,
with all kinds of things which you and I can add, and with a lot of reference material,
so not just accessible but also with the lack of all opacity.
So as far as manuscripts are concerned, a university in Japan has already started work on collecting all the Urdu manuscripts
that are scattered all around the world, and making them available in PDF format.
But things should not stop there,
because there should be a system of deciphering them and making them available with all the research tools.
There are two very important publications.
One is the 22 volume Urdu dictionary that has recently been completed by Urdu Lughat (dictionary) Board in Karachi.
So that big publication is there.
But I would be surprised if any of us present in this hall would own, or would plan to own a set of that.
Similarly, Punjab University has done an excellent translation of encyclopedia of Islam in 24 volumes.
So all this has to reach us, because actually, all those people who worked on this and other projects were working for posterity.
So I believe that we are that posterity.
So we should take knowledge, whatever knowledge has been created, it's a great treasure of not only linguistic but also biographical...
There are some 2500 autobiographies and biographies in addition to the 'tazkaraaz' that were written before, the history books.
So what we want is a big map in which you could access, you and I could access the material that is there
which charts the route that we have taken from that point to this point.
And we are already late, because the deadline was yesterday,
and paper decays and perishes.
So we have already lost a part of it, but the rest of it has to be rescued.
Not just rescued - it should be made a living part of our consciousness
because the kind of curiosity that my friend who came before me has displayed,
so we, you and I, have that curiosity.
We want to know, and we have a right to know, and we have to be able to appreciate and thank those people who worked for us
and who created this body of knowledge.
So we have to take that thing into hand, because not only in the metaphorical sense,
but all this information should be available on our hand-held devices, on our mobile phones, or wherever there is a terminal
on which we can access internet. So this is it.
Thank you very much.