Loud Speaker / لاؤڈ سپیکر

These are warts and all descriptions.Sometimes Manto openly abuses his subjects.Sometimes he goes into details of their lives which are extremely personal.

Most of these people are not familiar to me but Manto’s essay on Pakistan’s famous singer Noor Jehan (also known as the melody queen,Malika e Tarannum) is very interesting and the book and is worth reading for that alone.

Again,it is not very flattering.He highlights Noor Jehan’s flaws.Personally I’m not a fan of Noor Jehan and from what I’ve seen of her performances on TV,there was something very off-putting about her mannerisms.

Noor Jehan was notorious for her liasions with men and Manto goes into a fair bit of detail about her relationship with her first husband,Shaukat Hussain Rizvi.He does a proper hatchet job on the so called Malika e Tarannum (melody queen).