India, July 18 -- Chaudhary Mohammad Naim or CM Naim, the great Urdu scholar, teacher and translator, passed away in Chicago last week. We have been friends since the 1960s, and he has helped me on countless occasions. An early incident was in 1968 when I completed my MA and enrolled for a PhD at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in the comparative study of progressive poetry in Urdu and Hindi. Comparative literature was a new field of study in those days. I was searching for a competent mentor until someone pointed to Professor Naim, who was in the Urdu department on a sabbatical from University of Chicago. I went to meet him though I had only heard about him from his students, Steven Poulos and Carlo Coppola who had joined AMU's Urdu depa...