Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, one of India's leading Urdu scholars and poet, says the lyrics of Bollywood films can in no way be called shayri otherwise Urdu poetry even if they do incorporate Urdu words.  He added that in some old films there were bits of  shayri, on the contrary the new ones are in no way shayris.

Quite interestingly, Faruqi emphasized on the fact that the songs in films leave nothing to the imagination so that they could be interpreted by the audience but are just like reports. They can't be called as poems which in actuality has the capability to make people think on and on.

Faruqi, while speaking at a session of the ongoing Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival at Kolkata during Friday, asserted even though the volume of work produced in Urdu has gone up, the quality of a majority of them have become a subject for grief. Mourned Faruqi, who is a recipient of the prestigious Saraswati Samman in 1996 for his contribution to Urdu literature   and said now that there are so many journals as much as 500 to 600 on the contrary the quality is very poor. Echoing him, acclaimed Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi said Hindi literature was passing through a similar situation.

Faruqui also brought into prominence how the world wide web had helped in spreading Urdu, on the contrary he is not sure how much of the work available online is good. Another issue, according to the critic, is the restriction of the study of the subject to specific courses. He said that people read what's in their syllabus and nothing beyond that!

(AW:SB)