#DailyToast: No Manto at this lit fest Tamasha
The riot is no longer the Tamasha. That is routine and seeded with the potential to be justifiable. The lit fest is. So when Taseer and Dalrymple brawl in the schoolyard salon over whose is bigger, what they really mean is was my massacre better than yours. Of reviewers in their cliques and publishers in their salons and books in their camps. The murder of writerliness and whose body is colder and butler more brutal. The caste systems the book world are fighting today are not society's but their own. Not for publishing today the fiery debates of alternate political viewpoints. That is best translated in nostalgia. There is an empty seat at the table but that is for Manto the hipster celebrity, not Manto the arguer, and he unfailingly shows up when the argument has ended.
Podiums are not so much for obscenity trials as for marketing. Yes milord, we can withdraw the objectionable passage if you would but just understand that I so desperately need to either sell more copies than Bhagat, sneer at Bhagat in compensation for not having done so, or have my screenplay sold along with the rights of the book so that we are not wasting anybody's time here, so of course, there is no question of a trial, there will surely be a trailer, preferably by Anurag Kashyap, which will push the nerds to buy more copies of the book whose cover we may then change to the actor, rather than the character, because you know milord, plot is everything. No, no, nothing scheming about it, I refer to a few square meters in Goa or in Doon on which I may hobnob over whiskey with literary companions. But if you don't mind as much as you agree with what I'm saying could we come to an agreement that you ban me? Yes. It would help sales so. Or we could fear the worst and pull prints. Like teeth, there are things we do not stand for: law suits, civil liberties and principles. Writing them and saying them and roasting them is one thing but really now, do you expect me to get my well-manicured writing hands dirty fighting the good fight? What if they photograph me holding my champagne flute in the backdrop of a palace no writer ought have the temerity to afford to enter, God forbid, with a chipped fingernail? And what will I pick hor d'oeuvres with? Let's leave my hands out of this.
We may want to disagree with Guha, but who can really afford to. And we may seem to envy Ghosh, but who can really afford to. I mean, really, I bought his last trilogy as a set and almost nearly had to pick the EMI option on Amazon. And we may seem to empathise with Kalburgi, but really he wasn't a writer we had ever read or would because I cannot be expected to decipher a town from its own truth. I will sit here on this roadside bench in Banaras from which Rahul Gandhi speaks to a new generation that never came and wait for the foreigner or at the very least the PIO to paint my temples an Instagramable sepia filter.
What of Manto? Manto is dead. The lit fest killed him. They serve Thanda Ghosht on silver platters on the lawns now.