Al-Hilal: A Bandra building that once held Urdu salons
In 2013, Javed Akhtar lamented that Mumbai used to have a stellar list of Urdu writers like Ali Sardar Jaffri, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Yusuf Nazim, Qamar Siddiqui and many others who would meet regularly. "They are all dead now, the remaining writers do not interact with each other." In my recent visit to Mumbai I saw the debris of a building in Bandra which used to be a meeting place for poets, writers, and intellectuals. Al-Hilal, located close to Lilavati Hospital, once housed renowned academics and acclaimed Urdu writers but will now be replaced by a high-rise. Javed Akhtar and his brother Salman Akhtar were just among the several litterateurs who had friends and acquaintances in Al-Hilal. Away from South Mumbai's belt of Mohammad Ali Road and Nagpada, where bookshops and Urdu societies did the heavy lifting, Al-Hilal, in somewhat distant Bandra, shone bright in the city's Urdu world of the 1980s and 90s. The first set of flat owners were government officials who came...
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