Now, in 2018, when we’ve spent 71 proud years laughing from the other side of the Great Divide, we can truly ask – what are we really? Has the blinding pride and self-love that we call nationalism made us lose our ability to call out the absurd in ourselves? Well, we sent Manto over to the other side because…because. We in India with our phallic egos who imagine we are great because we are what Pakistan is not. At how much the Partition has really done us in. For consumers of his craft in India, at a time when a biopic of Saadat Hasan Manto has hit cinema screens, there is a special reason to laugh. Red Birds, his third novel, does not disappoint. A colossus of a writer who makes you laugh your way to tears whose words burn and lacerate till you can’t hold it in anymore and you have to stop just to start again.
Ever since A Case of Exploding Mangoes turned our eyeballs inside out (in 2008) with its ridiculously excitable satire, Mohammed Hanif has risen out of the subcontinent like a giant.
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