Why does language exist? For functional communication? Or is there some daily worth in its beauty? Is it ‘best’ when most correct? Or it is language, as the linguistic historian Ganesh Devy has said “most beautiful when it is wrong, which is why poets work to break language.”

We miss the classicality of Urdu in our film song lyrics today — the depth and flexibility of its literary tradition, its words for certain nuanced emotions, the pleasure of its rhythms and sounds. On the other hand, we now enjoy the increasingly inventive use of Hinglish, or other mixed languages. The playfulness, the inter-lingual puns, the mischievous verbal matchmaking that pinpoint contemporary experience which poets from Amir Khusro to Gulzar have excelled at.