Before the G20 summit, which took place in New Delhi from Sept. 9-10, Indian authorities carried out a "beautification" of the city. Entire slums were bulldozed, forcing some of the city's most vulnerable residents into homelessness.
AFTER Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s death on Dec 25, 2020, condolences and tributes flooded the online media, as was expected.
The print media, too, seemed in a shock and in fact the entire world of Urdu literature was in mourning. Some Urdu literary magazines and a few newspapers’ literary pages managed to publish hurriedly-assembled special sections on him within a short span of time.
It can be safely assumed that soon some more journals would come out with special issues on Faruqi. Books on him must be on their way, too. But as firsts, two full-length publications paying rich tributes to Faruqi have appeared. Looking at their thickness, it seems quite an achievement as it hardly took them a few months to produce something that can be referred to in the future for academic purposes besides paying tribute to and remembering the literary icon that helped define Urdu literature of his times.