Renowned Urdu poet and Padam Shri awardee Bashir Badr passed away at the age of 91 at his residence, Bashir Manzil in Bhopal, after prolonged illness, his family said.Born in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh on February 15, 1935, educated in Etawah and Aligarh, and later serving in Meerut, he eventually settled in Bhopal at Bashir Manzil in Fatehgarh area of Bhopal. (X)“Bashir Sahib left us… Prayers,” his wife, Rahat Badr, said in a social media post. He is survived by his wife and two children.According to this family, he breathed his last in the room where he used to conduct poetic gatherings.However, due to dementia, Badr had withdrawn from mushairas (poetic gatherings) but continued to meet his admirers even after losing his memory, his family said.Born in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh on February 15, 1935, educated in Etawah and Aligarh, and later serving in Meerut, he eventually settled in Bhopal at Bashir Manzil in Fatehgarh area of Bhopal.Badr earned his bachelors and doctorate from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), where he taught Urdu for several years before heading the Urdu department at Meerut College for 17 years.His early poetic work was included in the AMU’s curriculum before he even finished his postgraduate studies. He was known for modern Urdu poetry and had written close to 10,000 Urdu poems and published seven collection of ghazals. He was awarded Padma Shri in 1989.Poet Anjum Barabankvi said, “Today we lost the greatest poet of the Nayi Ghazal movement in the entire world.”“Bashir Badr was a trendsetter who gave the ghazal a new idiom and stature,” she added.