Monday, December 07, 2020

Urdu short story on Internet: How afsana, mini stories reach audience in the era of social media

 

On one hand, there is a fear that social media is affecting the print.

But on the other hand, it also provides opportunity to take your writings to a wider audience. 

As usual, there are pros and cons. Urdu readers and writers are using the new media to express themselves.

One of the biggest challanges is that Facebook is auto-translating posts.

Hence, if you write something in Urdu text from a region where Urdu is the not the first language, then for the reader it automatically translates it into Hindi or English or Kannada.

To deal with this, the best way is to write text and then post it in 'Image form'. 

Imagine, an eminent author wrote a long article in Urdu and on Facebook, it was translated in English by the social media network, extremely bad translation and even author's name was translated!

So, in order to deal with these issues and to ensure that not just the font is readable but also what you write, is visible to the reader, not some 'auto-translation'. On Twitter, there is a restriction--you can't post more than 280 characters, which means just 2-3 short sentences, hence, this is the way to tackle the restriction. 

So an afsaana or 'afsaancha' i.e. short story or mini story or any other creative work can be posted under the hashtag #Urdu and #UrduTwitter. As there is limit of 280 characters for a tweet, this is posted as an image file, and appears as photo, and hence even an entire short story fits in one tweet.

These are just a few examples of these short stories in Urdu.

You can read some of them under this hashtag at these links:

1. Jalwa dikhane ka shauq LINK

2. Aapki zabaan alag, Aapka culture alag LINK

3. Ansune naam, Anjaane log LINK

4. Qissa-e-Kitab LINK

5. Ye Urdu ke dost hain ya dushman LINK

6.  Whatspp group ka Sher  LINK

7. Fatihana muskurahat LINK

8. Woh be-imaan kaise ho sakta hai LINK

9۔ Yagya jaari hai LINK

10. Guzishta sadi ka Shahar. Khawab Kahani. LINK