Late to the Manto love...

...but only slightly.

Here's Mohammed Hanif in Dawn:

How are you getting on with your creator?

Have you settled that old argument with your creator: Who is a better short-story writer? You do realise that that this kind of claim hurts people’s sentiments. Especially sentiments of people who don’t read stories, who can’t read stories or who think reading and writing stories was a perversion. I hope you understand why your family didn’t inscribe that God vs Manto argument on your tombstone as you had wished. Censorship even in my death, you protest. No Sir, just common sense. I hope that you are up there with your creator, being argumentative, still carrying on that debate about who is better at the storytelling game. (That kind of thing, by the way, is called a creative-writing workshop these days). If your old friend Ismat Chughtai drops by while you are having that debate, you and your creator should take a break from arguing and say to her: we’ll both go in the kitchen and make tea, why don’t you write us a story.

(I was tempted to quote the very last bit, but that would be unfair to both Hanif and Manto.)

And Supriya Nair's 'Here Lies Manto':

In search of Manto in Byculla, Baghdadi points out that the neighbourhood in which he once lived has changed little. The marble plaques in Christ Church, across the road from Manto’s old house on Clare Road, recall the histories of members of its congregation who lived here over a century ago. Scratch the Urdu and Marathi flyers from the walls of the municipal garden, and the Star of David underneath, confirming its identity as an old Jewish cemetery, is intact. Any evidence of the writer of Mirza Ghalib and Mozail, Thanda Gosht and Letters to Uncle Sam having once lived here, though, must now be imagined.

Also see MS Gopal's images

The Poet is In & Bhagat's toys are Taken Away

Mainly because I refuse to use the word 'random' to describe my posts, even though that is precisely what this is:

1. Approaching the question of poems and ownership from a completely different place, this post. Holly S. Morrison sits at a Farmer's Market (with a sign that says The Poet is In, as if she were in a Peanuts comic) and writes custom poems that people buy from her. And yet:

I browsed the honey and beeswax candles at a neighboring table while Holly began clacking away on her manual typewriter. And I found myself reflecting on her smiling response to the final question I had asked her: she doesn’t keep copies of the poems for herself. I found myself feeling an unexpected pang of jealousy at this detachment, this acceptance of letting poems go, as if I had encountered a monk making a sand mandala, or the street sax player in Joni Mitchell’s classic song, “For Free.”

Though I write for free and Holly writes for money, I only give away the writing of the poem; she relinquishes the right to keep the poem. Many contemporary poets might feel that selling poems devalues our art. But it seems to me that Holly’s approach to poetry also participates in the sublime economy Lewis Hyde describes in The Gift, the classic book that helped so many artists better understand their art and taught me, in my twenties, how to survive as a poet.

According to Hyde, the function of art is to participate in a sacred gift economy that links giver, receiver, and the spiritual world. Art’s gift offers contemporary humans an essential alternative to the deadening commercial system. But in practice, it’s not so simple for a poet to give away the gift of poetry nowadays. Those who receive our gifts tend to be limited to critics, students, or other poets; the gifts of a “professional” poet get tangled up in names, reputations, career obligations, and previous bodies of work.

By selling one-of-a-kind poems and not even keeping a copy, Holly moves poetry out of the literary economy in which so many contemporary poems are enmeshed. Instead, she moves it along into the lush marketplace of daily life where all of us can meet on a human footing, helping each other satisfy our needs for life’s irreplaceable gifts of food and beauty and meaning.

2. So there was the ToI Lit Carnival held recently in Bombay. Wish I'd been at the Mohammed Hanif, Mohsin Hamid, Chetan Bhagat session (I'd have been happy to have taken everyone else but Hanif out of the picture but hey - I'm sure I'm not the only one). It seems to have been pretty hilarious:

You know what? I can't quote anything specific from it. It is full of deliciousness, so go read.

Hint: Bhagat's toys are taken away.

'more believable stories'

Mohammed Hanif in Dawn:

Trying to get my own Cairo update, I watched with concern as a barber shaved his customer while both watched Al Jazeera. A tour guide taking an American couple on Jesus Christ`s last walk on Via Dolorosa abandoned them for a bit and went into a shop to find out if Mubarak had left the country or not.

In Ramallah, the working capital of the very dysfunctional Palestinian Authority, I saw similar scenes. Cafe Lavie, one of the swish joints in town, was hosting a Spanish night. As the young kids danced the night away and middle-aged businessmen ogled them, they had one thing in common: they all insisted that Al Jazeera stay on so that they could watch the cool Cairo protesters flashing their `V` signs.

In Palestine Coffee Shop, an establishment so old and so set in its ways that it serves only coffee and nothing else, a place where old Arab men start playing cards at eight in the morning and are found taking naps before midday, customers wanted Al Jazeera on full volume.

Nobody becomes an expert on anything, let alone a political movement, by hanging out in mosques and coffee shops. I asked university students in Berziet and Nablus about why Palestinians were so interested in what was going on in Cairo. Their favourite word about the Cairo situation was `exhilarating`. They were all interested in what would happen next. They had all stayed up late to watch Mubarak speak, who, like all aging dictators, had indulged in a bit of self-pity.

Could something like this happen here, in Palestine? It was the obvious tourist question. But they were generous, as they had been asking the same question of each other.