Faiz Ahmad Faiz was a natural poet who innately knew how to use words in the most rhythmic fashion, and to coin new expressions when he would find the bag of conventional terms empty. Year 2011 is Faiz's birthday centennial. Faiz's centenary celebrations are taking place in Pakistan, India, and outside South Asia in Urdu understanding Diaspora. On Saturday, April 16, Friends of South Asia (www.friendsofsouthasia.org) celebrated Faiz's centennial by hosting a short play and a talk by Abid Hassan Minto.
A clever staged-reading--clever because the pages on which Faiz was presumably writing his poetry during his incarceration were used by the actors to read their lines from--of the short play "Dear Heart", written by Munib Anwar and Sam Lathem, featured Kashif Maqsood (as Faiz), Jessica Risco (as Alys) and Abbas Zaidi and Hemukumar Joshi as the two jailers. The play was directed by Saqib Mausoof and produced by Ijaz Syed.