Venue: Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA)
Date: 12th-14th February, 2016

Rekhta.org, world’s largest website for Urdu poetry and literature brought us Delhi’s first Urdu Festival of this proportion. The festival was held at IGNCA, one of our favourite venues for events in Delhi. Most of the programmes we have attended at IGNCA, be it the National Cultural Festival or North East Festival  have been quality events and we love the open, spacious, artistic and clean premises of IGNCA

The festival was inaugurated by Lt. Governer Mr. Najeeb Jung and he also recited Ghalib at the festival

Since half of Delhi was busy making plans for Valentine’s Day, Jashn-e-Rekhta, that was held between 12th-14th February, saw a lower turnout than what we had expected. We attended the event on 12th in response to a media invite.

The line up of shows on 12th had Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar’s play reading “Kaifi aur Main”.

We couldn’t find any seats reserved for media and from wherever we watched standing, we realised, the play was not suitable for such an open space. It required a lot of concentration for following the letters that were read out by the cast. Given that the open air environmnet wasn’t doing justice to the play, we thought of doing the next best thing – eating.

In fact, food was also a major attraction of the festival. They had an open air food court where many of the famous eateries of Delhi had put up their stalls.

Biryani and kebabs were the obvious choices for a lot of people but we opted for Imly, as we are already a fan of this Rajender Nagar vegetarian restaurant. The world is a small place and we bumped into another food blogger Neeru Singh from eatstory.com. It was fun to meet someone with common passion towards food, travel and blogging.

Since we were travelling the next day to Kasauli, and there was a lot of last minute packing to be done, we left early and on our way out had a look at various stalls that were selling Urdu literature, music, attars, home décor and other arty stuff.

There was also a henna counter where girls were having mehndi painted on their hands.

And yeah… we also spotted actress/activist Nandita Das being interviewed by media… She looked very pretty.