A Reading of Urdu Satire

Ali Husain Mir is a Bollywood lyricist and script writer and a professor of Management at William Paterson University. Mir visited the Hindi Urdu Flagship at the University of Texas at Austin to speak to Flagship students about his career in Bollywood production and the changing role of Urdu in Indian cinema. Mir is the author of Anthems of Resistance, the definitive book on the All India Progressive Writers’ Movement; he is also an acclaimed lyricist and script-writer for Hindi and Urdu films (Iqbal, Dor). Mir’s oeuvre engages issues of religious minorities and secularism in South Asia.

Michael Shapiro presents a talk entitled, Why Meter Matters: Reading 20th Century Hindi Poetry from the Perspective of Metrical Structure. This presentation opened the Hindi Urdu Flagship’s national symposium, Hindi in Texas & Beyond. The symposium was held April 10th, 2010 on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.

The Bronx Community College Writing Center community is an eclectic mix of races, religions, cultures, and interests. Our tutors and staff are former or current BCC students. They are foreign nationals or have lived or traveled around the world; they speak languages from every corner of the earth—Spanish, French, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Twi, English, and Patwa. They are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, and Agnostic. They are equally academically diverse, with degrees ranging from bachelor’s to master’s and majors in Business, Education, Psychology, Social Work, Physics, Creative Writing, and English. These significant differences might easily divide any other community, yet the BCC Writing Center staff instead celebrates its diversity with a unique, familial, and welcoming camaraderie. The Bronx Community College Writing Center film project Who We Are explores how this is possible through reflections of the BCC Writing Center staff on their work at the writing center and the ways that eclectic mix is addressed with still another question in mind—does diversity matter? The tutors offer reflections of the impact of their differences on each other and their work, as well as their perceptions of the diverse identities of our institution’s demographic.

Text reuse is the act of borrowing text (either verbatim or paraphrased) from an earlier written text. It could occur within the same language (mono-lingual) or across languages (cross-lingual) where the reused text is in a different language than the original text. Text reuse and its related problem, plagiarism (the unacknowledged reuse of text), are becoming serious issues in many fields and research shows that paraphrased and especially the cross-lingual cases of reuse are much harder to detect. Moreover, the recent rise in readily available multi-lingual content on the Web and social media has increased the problem to an unprecedented scale. To develop, compare, and evaluate automatic methods for mono- and crosslingual text reuse and extrinsic (finding portion(s) of text that is reused from the original text) plagiarism detection, standard evaluation resources are of utmost importance. However, previous efforts on developing such resources have mostly focused on English and some other languages. On the other hand, the Urdu language, which is widely spoken and has a large digital footprint, lacks resources in terms of core language processing tools and corpora. With this consideration in mind, this PhD research focuses on developing standard evaluation corpora, methods, and supporting resources to automatically detect mono-lingual (Urdu) and cross-lingual (English-Urdu) cases of text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism This thesis contributes a mono-lingual (Urdu) text reuse corpus (COUNTER Corpus) that contains real cases of Urdu text reuse at document-level. Another contribution is the development of a mono-lingual (Urdu) extrinsic plagiarism corpus (UPPC Corpus) that contains simulated cases of Urdu paraphrase plagiarism. Evaluation results, by applying a wide range of state-of-the-art mono-lingual methods on both corpora, shows that it is easier to detect verbatim cases than paraphrased ones. Moreover, the performance of these methods decreases considerably on real cases of reuse. A couple of supporting resources are also created to assist methods used in the cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse detection. A large-scale multi-domain English-Urdu parallel corpus (EUPC-20) that contains parallel sentences is mined from the Web and several bi-lingual (English-Urdu) dictionaries are compiled using multiple approaches from different sources. Another major contribution of this study is the development of a large benchmark cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse corpus (TREU Corpus). It contains English to Urdu real cases of text reuse at the document-level. A diversified range of methods are applied on the TREU Corpus to evaluate its usefulness and to show how it can be utilised in the development of automatic methods for measuring cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse. A new cross-lingual method is also proposed that uses bilingual word embeddings to estimate the degree of overlap amongst text documents by computing the maximum weighted cosine similarity between word pairs. The overall low evaluation results indicate that it is a challenging task to detect crosslingual real cases of text reuse, especially when the language pairs have unrelated scripts, i.e., English-Urdu. However, an improvement in the result is observed using a combination of methods used in the experiments. The research work undertaken in this PhD thesis contributes corpora, methods, and supporting resources for the mono- and cross-lingual text reuse and extrinsic plagiarism for a significantly under-resourced Urdu and English-Urdu language pair. It highlights that paraphrased and cross-lingual cross-script real cases of text reuse are harder to detect and are still an open issue. Moreover, it emphasises the need to develop standard evaluation and supporting resources for under-resourced languages to facilitate research in these languages. The resources that have been developed and methods proposed could serve as a framework for future research in other languages and language pairs.

顧愷之是東晉著名的畫家，世稱「才絕」、「畫絕」、「癡絕」。除了對藝術的熱愛之外，他博學有才，雅好文學，個性好諧謔，並擁有多方面的興趣。從史家評議中可見，對他的評論是｢矜能過實，譚諧取容，而才多逸氣，故有三絶之目。｣現代人對顧愷之的認識多在其繪畫理論上的影響，然而在晉書的史臣筆下，他的文章｢縟藻霞煥｣、｢才多逸氣｣，可見他的文筆之美；從｢矜能過實，譚諧取容｣更可以初步得到一個有自信滿溢而又幽默的印象，這又是他博學多才之餘，表現出「癡絕」的另一面。他的「癡」同他的人格聯繫在一起，而這樣的精神人格與魏晉時期的社會風尚、人物才性、品藻標準等都密切相關。 作為山水畫創始時期的代表作家之一、也身為傑出的早期肖像畫與人物畫家，顧愷之在藝術史上的作用與影響都是極其深遠的。顧愷之的維摩詰壁畫與戴逵雕塑的文殊菩薩像以及從獅子國傳來玉像，被當時稱為瓦官寺｢三絕」。顧愷之撰有《魏晉勝流畫贊》、《論畫》和《畫雲臺山記》等三本重要論著，在繪畫理論上也有許多前所未有的觀點，如傳神寫照、遷想妙得的藝術理念，東晉顧愷之在總結前人觀點的基礎上，第一次系統的闡述了人物畫中的形神關係。從顧愷之到謝赫、宗炳、王微，從人物畫論到山水畫論，從側重於對象之神的傳達到越來越重視主體精神意趣的融入，我們可以清楚地看到六朝畫論中傳神論的發展演化。顧愷之的畫論對後世影響深遠。顧愷之從創作實踐和理論建樹兩方面，把我國古代的繪畫推向了第一個高峰。 以往學術界對顧愷之的研究，總是側重於其繪畫方面的傑出成就，而對其在書法、藝術理論及文學創作諸多方面的成就未加以深入研究。因此，本文將以｢才、癡、畫三絕｣為主軸，嘗試從他的時代背景、家族門風、宗教信仰剖析東晉的顧愷之，並且多元延伸觸角來解讀顧愷之，甚至探討出顧愷之對後世的影響。期盼能在「畫絕」之餘，更深入的描繪出顧愷之「才絕」與「癡絕」的文人形象。

Hindi, Hinglish: Head to Head

In the framework of the Indian Constitution, the coordination of Hindi and other Indian languages is being reinforced by strong technological foundations. Institutions such as E-Governance, Digitalization, Unicode, and C-DAC are providing multilingual software, thereby promoting linguistic integration. Today, apart from Hindi, other Indian languages like Bengali, Tamil, Marathi, Kannada, and Telugu are witnessing vibrant publication of journals and magazines. Alongside the Hindi and Urdu Academies, organizations such as the Tamil Sangam, Kannada Sahitya Parishad, and Marathi Sahitya Parishad represent encouraging signs for the bright future of Hindi and other Indian languages. Many such positive developments are emerging in this direction. Institutions like the Central Hindi Directorate and the National Translation Mission are working to strengthen the bond between Hindi and other Indian languages. Indeed, all Indian languages together seem to fortify the unity of India’s multilingual cultural identity.

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Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a process of identification and classification of names into pre-defined categories- person, location, organization, date, time and others. NER serves as one of the most valuable application tools for varying languages and domains. Despite its popularity and successful deployment in English, this area is still exploratory for the Hindi language. NER in Hindi is a challenging task due to the scarceness of language resources and complex morphological structure. An initial impetus to write this chapter constitutes concise research on prevailing NER systems in the Hindi language. To achieve this objective, all-inclusive review and analysis of the research trends for NER in Hindi starting from the year 1999 to till date is conducted from varied articles. These articles include full-length articles, survey papers, dissertations, and guidelines which exploit decision analysis of the NER with respect to six vital aspects. All these aspects are collaborated and visualized in details within the chapter. The future research directions, challenges, and open issues in the field of NER are also presented for keen researchers. One can then design a unified, coherent NER system which can be applied to vivid language processing tasks for the Hindi and other Indian languages.

Plagiarism is an act of presenting someone else's idea, words and original work as one's own without acknowledging the original source. It creates many problems, especially for academic institutions and researchers. There are many plagiarism detection tools publically available which are used to overcome these problems, however these tools mainly work for particular languages like Arabic and English. In South Asian countries specifically India and Pakistan, a huge part of research content is available in Hindi and Urdu languages. Unfortunately, plagiarism detection in Urdu text cannot acquire the proper attention of research community because it has complex sentence structure and lacks linguistic resources. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for plagiarism detection specifically for Urdu language. There is no benchmark corpus available for Urdu plagiarism detection, and therefore we developed a corpus of Urdu language. We applied distance measuring method along with vector space method to measure the similarity between suspicious and source text. For evaluation purpose, we defined different classes of plagiarized text such as paraphrase, heavily plagiarized, light plagiarized and direct copy-paste. Moreover, we evaluated each class of plagiarized text in terms of precision, recall, and f-measure. The experimental results have presented that Levenshiten distance and Jaccard containment methods produced significant improvement in the performance of plagiarism detection compared with existing methods.

The research topic of this paper centers on the literature written by Taiwan’s Aboriginal women in the 90’s. Two aboriginal women authors Rimui•Aki and Liglave•A-wu were chosen as observing subjects. Focusing on their feminine literature publications after the 90’s this paper aims to compare and contrast their different writing styles on similar topics. The researcher observed different aspects of their writings such as: [childhood background and the creative process], [women’s image and feminism] and [writing style] to examine the similarities and differences on Taiwanese aboriginal women author’s writing on feminine literature hoping that from a women’s perspective the rich and diverse connotations present in aboriginal women’s writing can be shown. This paper is divided into five chapters, chapter one is the introduction then the two authors are discussed independently in the second and third chapters. The fourth chapter compares the two authors. And chapter five concludes. Rimui•Aki and Liglave•A-wu’s writing are built upon their aboriginal ethnic background and their personal experiences living in a tribal society. From their works we not only read about the authors’ life in the mountains but also witness the refined mind of a women. These are distinctive features of aboriginal women’s writing. In Rimui•Aki’s writings we realize that aboriginal women’s literature is not limited to aboriginal culture issues only. From her writings we see very strong self-expression of aboriginal women. Liglave•A-wu’s writings show evidence of discussions about feminine issues. Both women writers have distinctive features in their writings but they both use women’s’ role, feminine issues and mother’s perspective as a theme in their writings. Not only does the two authors find self-assurance through their native cultural roots, but they also investigate their roles as a woman and other women’s role living in an aboriginal tribe. Through these new perspectives the authors bring out a new flavor in aboriginal literature.

According to Hsu (2005), it was suggested that journalistic English writing could be a method leading students to be efficient in learning how to write English business correspondence. Aiming to verify Hsu's claim, the current paper explored the relationship between journalistic and business English writing through an empirical study on the effects of attending journalistic English courses on English majors' performances in business English writing. In the hopes of providing curricular suggestions, we also carried out a large-scale survey to investigate the current situation of curriculum design regarding journalism as well as business English writing in English department of universities and colleges in Taiwan. The research design employed a single independent variable, i.e. whether students attending the business English writing course took the journalistic English course, and a single dependent variable, i.e. students' performances in business English writing. In addition, the educational system (so-called vocational universities/colleges of technology and traditional universities/colleges) was utilized as an independent variable, whereas the order of offering journalistic English courses and business English writing was regarded as a dependent variable. A t-test was used to assess the influences of taking part in journalistic English courses on business English writing; moreover, a Pearson Chi-square was adopted to evaluate the differences of the curriculum design between two educational systems. The results indicate no significant difference between performances of students with journalistic English training and of those without it. Furthermore, no significant difference on curriculum design was found between two educational systems. Different collocated orders of journalistic and business English courses exist in the curriculum design of both educational systems. The current findings do not show that Hsu's idea is problematic but may point out the pedagogical problems in these courses instead. The study thus suggests the necessity of establishing a link between teaching journalistic English and business English; likewise, the curriculum design of the two courses needs to be reconsidered carefully and precisely.

Hugh Hampton Young: father of American urology.

During the British invasion of India in the sixteenth century the Dutch East India Company developed markets in many cities and towns under their control. In 1765, the company's influence had grown to such an extent that the United Kingdom had actually controlled the largest part of the country. In the beginning, English was the only subject for local community through the work of Christian missionaries, and that there was no formal order for the introduction of the language of the masses of the people. However, in the mid-seventeenth, the English language became the language of government, and many of the elite classes of the Indian people asked for instruction in the English language as a tool for social progress. In 1857, universities were opened in Mumbai (Bombay), Kolkata (Calcutta) and Chennai. English was still considered as the language of government, the social elite and the national after independence, it was assumed that the English language would have to be gradually being replaced by the sphere of the state.[i] However, it was not clear that as to which language it should be replaced. In the beginning the Hindi language was the most spoken language, this seemed like the obvious choice, but the opinions were divided for different languages. In a country with a population of over 900 million people and more than a thousand languages, it was difficult to choose a national language but the native speakers of that languages will automatically gain access to a high social status, and it was easier to get power and influence. It had been expressed that English was not the native language , there was Hindi as official language in India and the English was just like Bengali, Gujrati and urdu language. Gandhi was also in favour of Hindi language and wanted to have a special status of English language for individuals. [ii] [i] Aziz k.k, M.A., The Development and reconstruction of university Education in Pakistan, London, 1951, P.26. [ii] Qureshi I.H.,Inaugural Address at the Educational Convention, 1959, Lahore, P.37.

Resurrection, Remediation, and Religious Fundamentalism in Contemporary Indian Sci-Fi/Fantasy Films Anu Thapa (bio) In recent decades, as Indian society’s digital modernization has continued apace and Indian cinema has completed its transition to digital, Hindu fundamentalist nationalism has been resurrected in the mainstream socio-political arena. This fundamentalist political ideology, also known as “Hindutva 2.0,” has found a happy and dangerous convergence in the narrative and aesthetics of contemporary Indian sci-fi/fantasy films. This essay traces the contours of this convergence by juxtaposing the ideological resurrection of Hindutva alongside the popular Krrish and Baahubali franchise films in contemporary India. These franchise films, I argue, harness the entanglements between religion and cinema technology to produce a speculative and spectacular Hindu cosmology that resonates with Hindu fundamentalist ideology. The expansive visuals and excessive spectacle of these films encompass the theological and technological all within themselves, serving the technophilic avatar of Hindutva 2.0. Remediated by digital technology and abetted by the photorealist effects of digital cinema, this fundamentalist ideology has become inextricable from the aesthetics of contemporary sci-fi/fantasy films. As contemporary cinema gets embroiled in the process of sensing and sense-making of this iteration of religious fundamentalism, that has suffused India’s socio-political arena, Walter Benjamin’s warnings about the “aestheticizing of politics” has become ever more relevant.1 [End Page 289] Religion and Hindi popular cinema That there exists a connection between religion and Hindi popular cinema is not a novel proposition. Even a cursory survey of Indian cinema scholarship will show that religious ideology, religiosity, and notions of faith are crucial to the composition and the consumption of Hindi popular cinema. Indeed, the catch-all term “religion” has been variously deployed to make claims about the aesthetic distinctions of this cinema. Scholars like Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Geeta Kapur, among others, have underscored the religious symbolisms of early Indian mythological films to typify the aesthetics of Indian popular cinema as vernacular.2 Similarly, film critic, Andre Bazin, argued that the success of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) can be attributed to its aesthetic, which is markedly different from the “religious, social, and melodramatic music hall” of Indian popular cinema.3 Hindi popular cinema revels in inexplicable miracles and divine interventions rendered through over technological manipulations. The oft-referenced sequence in Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony (1975), depicting the miraculous restoration of vision represented through superimposition, exemplifies the fact that elements of deus ex machina have prevailed in this cinema. Over the years, Hindi popular cinema’s relationship with religion has changed alongside the socio-cultural and political impetus of the Indian nation. Its predilection for Hinduism and Hindu culture has remained a constant throughout, even as this cinema has incorporated Islamicate culture and Urdu language into its folds. In the early 1900s, Hindu mythologicals and devotionals provided the stories and the spectacles for the first films made in the Indian subcontinent. Hindu mythologicals, thus, became the formative genre of Indian cinema. Even during the Nehruvian era, arguably the most secular phase in the history of post-independence India, mainstream Hindi films retained their alignment with Hinduism. Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957) is perhaps the most widely and bestknown example from this period. During the 1970s Emergency Era, amidst communal strife and sectarian violence, films like Amar Akbar Anthony engaged with notions of religious harmony albeit under the auspices of a Hindu nation. Following economic liberalization in the 1990s, overt engagement with religion seemed to disappeared from Hindi popular cinema. Instead, films like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) [End Page 290] relied on Hindu overtures to establish the NRI protagonist’s sociocultural affiliation with the Indian nation-state. Post-2000, Hindu fundamentalist ideology and popular cinema have collided in spectacular and, often, violent fashion, both on and off-screen. Emboldened by the political ascendency of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), right-wing Hindu extremist groups moved into the center, appointing themselves the cultural and moral overseers. Against the exacting standards of Hindu fundamentalist ideals, popular cinema and its role in imaging and imagining the Indian nation has come into stark focus. On the one hand...