As far as age goes, Sukti Sarkar, a retired banker who is only 14 years old and Bibhabori Bhattacharyya , are 50 years apart but what binds these two people is their fondness for Urdu and the fact that they both learned the language only recently.
They are among the nearly 500 people who got benefit or are in the process of getting it from the online courses being conducted by Know Your Neighbour, a social experiment being run in West Bengal to encourage communal harmony, is collaboration with Kolkata’s Maulana Azad College.
The classes started as soon as the pandemic-forced lockdown came into force in 2020, the idea being to give a constructive option to people who suddenly found themselves sttucked at their houses, but they continue to attract aspiring learners of Urdu, a language once popular across north India but now associated largely with the Muslim community.
The Know Your Neighbour, an initiative came into process in the year 2016 in collaboration with SNAP (Social Network for Assistance to People) Bengal, with the aim of facilitating actual interaction and relationships between communities.