Bazm-e-Sukhan is nurtured under A-CODE (Art & Collective for Digital Empowerment), an initiative led by Centre for Development Policy & Practice (CDPP) in partnership with the Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) that foregrounds community knowledge systems, cultural agency, and ethical digital inclusion. A-CODE situates digital transformation within lived social and cultural contexts, emphasising that technology must serve people’s practices, values, and collective aspirations rather than override them. Through A-CODE, DEF advances a model of digital empowerment that goes beyond access and skills, engaging instead with questions of consent, authorship, cultural continuity, and ethical responsibility. Platforms such as Bazm-e-Sukhan emerge from this approach, where culture is not peripheral to digital futures, but central to shaping them.
On January 14, 2026, the seventh anniversary of Bazm-e-Sukhan was marked at Lamakaan, Hyderabad, through an evening that brought together literature, music, digital storytelling, and critical reflection. Conceived not merely as a commemorative gathering, the event created a reflective space to examine how culture, technology, and community knowledge systems intersect within a rapidly transforming digital society.
Drawing inspiration from Kuchh Ishq Kiya, a phrase resonant with the moral and poetic legacy of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the evening foregrounded enduring questions of dignity, justice, and responsibility, questions that remain central to both cultural practice and digital empowerment.
Bazm-e-Sukhan: Sustaining Cultural Dialogue
Over the past seven years, Bazm-e-Sukhan has evolved into a sustained cultural platform within A-CODE, DEF’s initiative focused on community knowledge systems, digital agency, and cultural rights. Within this framework, Urdu literature is engaged as a living, social practice rather than a static inheritance.
Its gatherings have consistently strengthened dialogue across generations and disciplines, creating a shared space for poets, scholars, artists, technologists, and civil society actors. The seventh anniversary reflected this trajectory by situating literary and artistic expression within contemporary debates on digital transformation, access, and cultural survival.
The bazm (“gathering”) functioned simultaneously as a cultural archive and a forum for critical inquiry, demonstrating that continuity is not automatic, but requires active stewardship, particularly in digitally mediated environments.
Artisanal Wisdom and Meaningful Digital Inclusion
A key session of the evening was a visual storytelling presentation by Osama Manzar, Founder-Director of the Digital Empowerment Foundation. Rooted in DEF’s A-CODE approach, the session focused on narratives emerging from artisan communities, folk practitioners, calligraphers, and grassroots social enterprises navigating the digital ecosystem.
Rather than celebrating technology as disruption, the presentation foregrounded lived realities, where digital tools are selectively adopted to support livelihoods, preserve cultural authorship, and extend reach without severing social or historical context. These narratives reiterated a core DEF principle: digital empowerment is meaningful only when communities retain agency over how technology enters their lives.
The concept of the phygital was explored not as a trend, but as a lived condition, where physical skill, oral tradition, and embodied knowledge coexist with digital platforms. This framing emphasised consent, trust, and local control as prerequisites for ethical digital integration, reflecting A-CODE’s commitment to community-centred digital practice.
Museum of Digital Society (MoDS): A Living Ethical Framework
The Museum of Digital Society (MoDS) is part of DEF’s A-CODE initiative, which seeks to critically examine how digital systems intersect with culture, labour, ethics, and social power. Within A-CODE, MoDS functions as a reflective and pedagogic space, documenting not only technologies and tools, but also the social choices, exclusions, and moral questions embedded within them.
Running concurrently throughout the programme, the MoDS exhibition was conceived as an integral component of the evening rather than a parallel display. MoDS is envisioned as a living museum, one that does not merely collect artefacts, but documents processes, tensions, and ethical dilemmas shaping contemporary digital society.
At Bazm-e-Sukhan, the exhibition was curated around the theme Fana-e-Haq & Rights in the Age of AI, offering a reflective and culturally grounded lens on contemporary digital systems. The exhibition examined how extractive digital models often reduce culture, labour, and knowledge to raw data, stripped of context, consent, and human meaning.
Drawing from Sufi ethical traditions, Fana-e-Haq was used as a metaphor to question dominance and excess in technological systems, suggesting instead humility, restraint, and ethical withdrawal. Through this framing, MoDS articulated a crucial argument aligned with A-CODE’s core premise: that artificial intelligence and automation must be designed to know when to recede, creating space for human creativity, cultural memory, and social justice. Ethics, the exhibition argued, cannot be an afterthought; they must be foundational to digital futures, particularly in societies shaped by inequality and historical marginalisation.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Literature as Moral Compass
The literary and musical sessions dedicated to Faiz Ahmed Faiz formed the emotional and intellectual anchor of the evening. Scholar Mir Ali Hussain reflected on Faiz’s political imagination, highlighting how his poetry continues to offer language for resistance, compassion, and hope.
Musical renditions by Smita Bellur carried these reflections into the realm of shared feeling, reaffirming that culture communicates not only through analysis, but through experience and affect.
These sessions reaffirmed Faiz’s relevance within contemporary contexts shaped by technological acceleration and social uncertainty.
Reflections and Continuing Work
The seventh anniversary of Bazm-e-Sukhan reaffirmed a shared understanding central to DEF and A-CODE’s work: that digital transformation, when detached from culture and ethics, risks erasure rather than empowerment.
The evening echoed principles that guide the Digital Empowerment Foundation’s interventions: that community knowledge systems must be respected and protected, that technology should enable livelihoods and dignity rather than extract value, and that ethical reflection must accompany innovation at every stage.
Rather than offering conclusions, the gathering functioned as a continuation, an invitation to keep asking how digital futures can remain accountable to people, cultures, and collective memory.
In this sense, Bazm-e-Sukhan at seven was not only a celebration of the past, but a commitment to the work ahead.
Kuchh ishq bhi zaroori hai.
And so is the responsibility that comes with it.
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