Make Yourself Eligible, Don’t Make Demands

Rather, it was because the language was able to prove that it was useful and, therefore, deserving of such attention. The same is true for the Japanese language today. Till the mid-20th century, not many people in the West cared to learn Japanese. But today, scientific treatises written in Japan are quickly translated into Western languages and enjoy great respect and popularity in Western countries. This is because of Japan’s amazing progress in the field of electronics. Western scholars realize that their understanding of electronics will remain far from complete unless they are able to read the latest researches being conducted in this field in Japan. This is one reason why there are so many scholars of the Japanese language in the West today. By proving its importance and usefulness, the Japanese language has won for itself a very respectable position in the West that it did not enjoy before. The actual problem with Urdu is that the corpus of Urdu writings consists largely of just two genres: one is poetry, and the other is religious sermons, written in a preachy mode. In today’s scientific age, these two genres have lost their importance. There is now no area of research where high-quality books are being written in Urdu, books that people think that if they do not read, they will not be able to get a complete and proper understanding of their subject of interest. In any discipline, be it philosophy, history, sociology or technology or whatever, there are no books in Urdu which are impossible to ignore if one wants to gain such an understanding. In a climate of such utter intellectual poverty, the ‘inheritors’ of Urdu themselves cannot give it adequate importance, leave alone others. And so, to expect others to give it importance is simply wishful thinking. According to the Quranic verse cited earlier (13:17), the key to a successful life in this world is to be beneficial to others. Here, the giver receives. Here, success comes through proving oneself capable, not through making