KARACHI: Distinguished Urdu poet Naseer Turabi died of a heart attack here on Sunday evening. He was 74. He leaves behind his wife and two sons.
Mr Turabi was born on June 15, 1945 in Hyderabad Deccan. He was the son of the renowned religious scholar and khateeb Allama Rasheed Turabi. After independence his family decided to migrate to Pakistan and settle in Karachi where he grew up. He obtained his masters degree in journalism from the University of Karachi in 1968 after which he joined an insurance company.
Despite having brilliant command over the Urdu language and a gift for writing top-notch poetry, he published his first collection of poems a bit late in his career. Titled Aks Faryadi it came out in the year 2000. Afterwards, he published a book on Urdu poetics Sheiryaat followed by Laraib (a collection of na’at, manqabat and salaam) and Lughatul Awam, a dictionary of slang or colloquial words. One of his ghazals whose first line is Woh hamsafar tha magar us se hum nawa