Top columnist Aakar Patel mentions how, up until writer Saadat Hasan Manto's (1912-55) daughter Nighat (settled in Pakistan) turned 30, she wasn't aware that her father had been so famous. Even in India, it was only in the early '80s, when Debonair magazine ran Khushwant Singh's translation of Manto's short story Bu (Odour), that he became a sensation, again.

Aakar — who's translated Manto's columns in an anthology titled Why I Write — recalls Bu had left him deeply disturbed when he read it at 13. Reading this, my respect for Aakar, already high, went up further. He had access to Debonair at 13 — more significantly, he read short stories in them! That Urdu iconoclast Manto has been omnipresent as a giant in India's literary landscape ever since, especially among the young, is a given. I was first attracted to Manto because, like me, he moved to Bombay in his early 20s, enjoyed his drinks, was a night person, lived for/among friends (like Shyam, and superstar Ashok Kumar, in his case), following the film world closely as a journalist.