Stars From Another Sky - Saadat Hasan Manto

This is a Gem from Saadat Hasan Manto no doubt and Khalid Hasan has translated it deftly in English.It turns the boring black & white world of 1930-1940 Bollywood into some of the most colorful characters and riveting escapades.Lust filled life excesses of artists,literary figures and actors are revealed and that is only comparable with Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street".Manto comes out as a fearless no-holds-barred writer and this book tells or presents to you life as it was actually like in 1930-1940 Bombay.Though at times I thought how would he know who is sleeping with whom or who privately told what to whom,may be some of it relies on gossip though I will like to believe otherwise.

My favorite chapter was on V.H.Desai "God's Clown " really funny piece of writing on Bollywood's first comedian superstar,a Law graduate who always forgot his lines.Chapters on Ashok Kumar and Sitara Devi are quite revealing and latter also has details of private life of K.Asif the director Mughal-e-azam.Chapters on Nargis and especially Shyam are very nice.His life with Shyam is heart-touching story of friendship and just tells of secular hearts in our citizens as it gets close to describing days of partition.This is a must read for film fans and people who think only today's youngsters had all the fun and people in 1930-1940 were all joy-killer and lived serious lives.

"Poona is a city of temples and you have to walk barely a couple of hundred yards to come upon one.Masood's next act was to go into the first temple we passed,pull the cord and ring the bell .When we heard the sound,Shyam and I prostrated ourselves,our foreheads touching the bare road,piously intoning,"Shiv Shambhu,Shiv Shambhu".From there on,the bell of each temple we came across was dutifully sounded and after we had risen from our supplications,we would break into laughter.once or twice we even woke up a priest,but before the astonished and bleary-eyed man could say anything,we were off." - Manto in Stars from another sky on Shyam the classic Bollywood Actor and his beloved friend

Below is a passage on K.Asif  by Sitara Devi,

"In my view the heart-breaking moment in Dilip Kumar's life was not the break-up with Kamini kaushal but the time when he learnt that K.Asif has eloped with his sister.By then I was out of K.Asif's life as the wicked man had wooed and married my friend Nigar Sultana.I can't figure out who was the bigger fool - I or Nigar?His back-stabbing Dilip bhai was unacceptable to me,I cursed him he would die for the sin he has committed.On 9 March 1971 Gopi Krishna called me and informed me of K Asif's premature death.I could hear my own curse ringing in my ears."


P.S. I didn't knew girls were as crazy about Ashok Kumar in 1930s as they were about Rajesh Khanna in 1970s.