Imran Khan is the target of your Goebbels’ vendetta!
Apropos to the excessively grandiloquent, wastefully voluble and patently frivolous attempt The Express Tribune has been part of subjecting Imran khan as prime target of its Goebbels’ vendetta. Now, what shall I say about The Express Tribune? The blog has started to give me an impression as if its raison d’etre is to have a unifocal soliloquy on publishing literally anything against Imran Khan without realising how ludicrous the writer may sound or implausible the publisher. If I were to describe The Express Tribune in a nutshell, I think I’ll marginally settle for this definition: Camelot of an erudite savant ...
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Manto doesn’t let you forget
My first ‘experience’ of Manto’s work was with his short story ‘Khol Do’ – a deceptively simple tale set in the turmoil of pre-partition Pakistan that artfully depicts the horrors that ensued from and during mass migration. I use the word ‘experience’, rather than encounter or stumble upon, because there is absolutely no way that you chance upon Manto’s work as one does a pebble in the path, kick it aside and calmly move on. Any human being that feels simply cannot be unmoved by Manto’s work. Akin to the brazen persona that Manto possessed, he consequently inspired either deep ...
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Sights and sounds at the Karachi Literature Festival
Foreign correspondents like conjuring the “books, not bombs” angle to justify the expense of flying down to Karachi to hear a bunch of people talk about politics and their books (in that order). But at this year’s Karachi Literature Festival there were bombs everywhere. Pervez Hoodbhoy led a discussion on bombs of the nuclear kind, Ayesha Siddiqa lobbed a few verbal bombs in Anatol Lieven’s direction for not nursing sufficient hatred for the Pakistan Army while Mohammed Hanif even dropped the deadliest bomb of all: the F-bomb. I began my annual pilgrimage to the Karachi Literature Festival by making a mental ...
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Manto: Still relevant, still cherished
January 18 marked the 57th death anniversary of Saadat Hassan Manto, the greatest and most controversial short story writer ever produced by Urdu literature. Manto jumped into the realm of Urdu fiction in the early 30s. In the wake of the Progressive Movement, when all writers inclined towards realism were ardently following the ideology of the movement, Manto was the only exception. He was a movement unto himself. With his unique treatment of the subject, and psycho-analysis of human behaviour, Manto turned the whole course of Urdu fiction, which until then was mainly under the influence of Prem Chand’s realism and ...
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Thoughts on Khayaban-e-Nowhere’s birthday
This week, Khayaban-e-Nowhere turns one. Some of you will applaud while others (particularly a segment of The Express Tribune’s online readership) will repeatedly smack their foreheads against a wall, wondering what the state of Pakistani English newspapers has come to. But we will come to that in just a bit. Khayaban-e-Nowhere has in its one year covered a strange multitude of topics. The great thing about Khayaban-e-Nowhere is that it has absolutely no particular regimen, plan or focus. It is essentially a writing space for anything under the sun. When you write about pretty much anything you begin to see ...
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The last cloud of a storm
Mansha Yaad, who had been writing short stories, surprisingly passed away in Islamabad this week. Here in Lahore the next day, Hameed Akhtar, fed up with his painful ailment, too, decided that he had had enough of this world. Mansha Yaad was in the mid-spring of his writing. He had published a lot of short stories that earned him plaudits from lay readers as well as critics. Emboldened by the approval, his pen appeared to have grown more fluent. But who can rein death? All of a sudden it ambushed Mansha. Call it providence and be resigned to it. Everybody who ...
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I have received a strange book of poetry. I started reading it: a foreword, a second foreword and another foreword. After that, yet another foreword. What kind of poetry can it be, I wondered, to need so many prefaces (and where is it hiding). The book is called Satre Nau, the author is Manzar Hussain Akhtar. Having encountered several forewords one after the other I thought maybe these were originally written for separate books and have now been compiled in a single volume. But then I turned another page and to my surprise came upon poetry. Why, I wondered, should poetry ...
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Kung Fu Paindoo
Yesterday, I had another encounter with Disney*: I watched Kung Fu Panda 2. The bits I loved, and I really loved them, were the jokes. So when the Evil King, a peacock with a stainless steel body and lethal blade-feathers, yells exultantly to its minion-wolf: “CALL IN THE WOLVES! All of them! I want them ready to move! The Year of the Peacock begins NOW!” The minion, instead of running along to hasten the orders, pauses, “Right now?” he wonders aloud. “‘Cause it’s the middle of the year, so you’d only get, like, half of the Year of the Peacock.” But generally speaking ...
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The artist’s way
We live in an ugly world; there’s no doubt about that. For the past ten years we have been bombarded with images of terrorism, violence, destruction and death: on the television, in the newspapers and on the Internet. The most recent assault on our collective sensibilities and our battered sense of security is an image I just can’t get out of my head: Sarfaraz Shah begging for his life before being shot and left to bleed to death by the Rangers in Karachi this last week. As I said many months ago on Twitter, Pakistan is a nation in the ...
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VS Naipaul: Proud and prejudicial
“It is the best for all tame animals to be ruled by human beings. For this is how they are kept alive. In the same way, the relationship between the male and the female is by nature such that the male is higher, the female lower, that the male rules and the female is ruled.” This is what Aristotle said hundreds of years ago. It is a less than comforting thought that man has only evolved so much in the years following Aristotle. I say this after reading VS Naipaul’s latest attention seeking rant in Amy Fallon’s report in The Guardian. ...
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