We can find hardly any radical difference between literary journalism in India and Pakistan. The magazines coming from India have more or less the same format, the same variable literary content, and identical limitations and handicaps. The number of such journals from India is much higher, though most of them fail to reach us. In spite of this limitation, it can be easily observed that only a few of them achieve the desired standard, impact and circulation. Our concern here is primarily with those that do.

'Shair' (Editor: Iftikhar Imam Siddiqi) is a seventy-seven-years-old monthly, very rarely failing to reach its readers. It is unique and uniform in its contents and standards. Perhaps the strongest point of this journal is its exceptionally wide circulation, reaching almost every corner of the world where the Urdu reader is to be found.

'Naya Daur' by Sajid Rashid, a modern short story writer, is known, in addition to formal literary expression, for reserving a substantial space for translations.

'Sehn-e-Jadid' (editor: Zubair Rizvi) devotes more than half of its volume to the arts besides writing. Hence we can find articles on film, theatre, music, dance, fine arts and contemporary socio-political topics of relevance. Zubair Rizvi is a celebrated poet and in spite of the progressive shade, his magazine is known to be aligned with modernism.

'Sher-o-Hikmat' is a prestigious magazine edited by the well-known poets Mughni Tabassum and Shehryar. Its voluminous issues give the reader a bulk of high-class literature to enjoy. It had three phases and was twice wound up. The third phase is continuing in its individualistic style; the current issue received consists of two volumes. 'Sher-o-Hikmat' is a journal highly rated by writers, since it promises to become an work of reference for the study of Urdu literature for all times.

'Saughat' (Editor: Mahmood Ayaz) has been a controversial magazine of exceptional importance, primarily due to its contents, but also because of the unmatched personality of the editor. He was a tough man, firm in his own opinions. He was perhaps the only editor who included a detailed editorial giving his own opinion about the writings included in the issue. It was not rare to read a note by him expressing his total or partial disagreement or dissatisfaction with an article or opinion presented in the same issue. His editorials are pieces of unique literary criticism. Unfortunately, since his demise a couple of years ago, 'Saughat' has ceased to appear.

'Istaara' (Editor: Salahudin Pervaiz) earns a special mention since it's an ideology based magazine with a religious tilt. Mohammad Salah-ud-Din Pervaiz is a modern poet himself and his magazine provides a ready platform for the propagation of Gopi Chand Narang's anti-modernism. 'Istaara' is considered as different from 'Shab Khoon' as 'Funoon' and 'Auraq' have been in our reference.

But 'Shab Khoon' (Editor: Shams-ur-Rehman Faruqi) stands out among literary journals of the subcontinent owing to its ideological stance and unique literary content. Around four decades ago, the world of Urdu letters started revolving around questions arising from the conflict between the progressive writers' movement (1936 -- 1960) and the modernism of the early 60's. The modernists position was that creative pursuits with a pre-determined conclusion in mind, such as advocated by the progressives, could not serve any useful purpose. The writer or creator of literature must have subjective freedom.

In India, modernism produced the phenomenon -- already history now --known as 'Shab Khoon'. Faruqi had his own opinion of modernism, as opposed to his comrades elsewhere. This magazine lasted for four decades, with a brief period of disruption.

Faruqi insists that his brand of modernism was not antagonistic to progressive thought. This claim can only be accepted with reservations. Undoubtedly he succeeded in involving progressive writers in the literary debates appearing on the pages of 'Shab Khoon' and gave liberal space to their creative works as well.

This co-operation increased with time and the polarisation became gradually subdued. It may be interesting to note that modernism got so heavily glued to 'Shab Khoon' that all those opposed to it, refer to it, though sarcastically, as 'Shab Khoon's jadidiyat'. It is an issue deserving detailed discussion. The term 'post-modernism' has been described as too vague elsewhere. If at all we have to give a name to the recent dominant trend, Neo-classicism seems to be a far more appropriate title. In fact classicism, progressivism, and modernism have all merged into a synthesis following the typical phenomenon of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Anyway, in June 2006, the last Issue of 'Shab Khoon' appears exactly after forty years of its inception in 1966. It consists of two volumes. The first volume comprises of seven Issues collected in one book (Number 293 to 299). In the preface the editor describes briefly the history and the background of 'Shab Khoon'. The second volume is, in fact, an anthology, a huge one, of selected writings from the magazine. As stated in the preface, of the second volume, the first editorial board comprised of Faruqi, Jamila Faruqi, Hamed Hassan Hamad and Jafar Raza. These youngsters of that time were patronised by Dr. Syed Ejaz Hussain, who edited the first twelve Issues (June 66 -- May 67), Prof. Syed Ehtasham Hussain and Dr. Masihu Zaman. 'Shab Khoon' was preferred over 'Taysha' as the title of the magazine. Dr Syed Ejaz Hussain and Jafar Raza (Deputy Editor) were the first to quit, and the magazine was given in the charge of Shams-ur-Rehman Faruqi.

In its early days 'Shab Khoon' was alleged to be an America-sponsored project to counteract Progressive thought's gaining momentum, an allegation which was, understandably, strongly denied by the editor.

The second volume is of paramount importance, not only for the quantity of good creative work it carries but also as documentary proof of 'Shab Khoon' being the most involving of all the journals of the present time. A glossary appended to volume I gives valuable data about the writers and poets whose work has appeared in 'Shab Khoon' since 1966, and the frequency with which they were published. It's useful for research scholars in particular. Balraj Komal, an eminent senior poet from India, leads the list by appearing in seventy issues of 'Shab Khoon'. Almost every big name of Urdu literature can be seen in the list of contributors with varied frequency.

Why could the journal not continue while it was at the peak of its popularity? The simple answer is the failing health of the editor. Faruqi has a case of unstable Angina and has developed a strong feeling that he might be running short of time. Although his personal creative projects undoubtedly deserve his whole time and attention, Urdu literature will remain indebted to the excellent life long services rendered by him. But every beginning has an end. And from an end a new beginning can take heart.

'SYMBOL' (Editor: Ali Mohammad Farshi) is a Rawalpindi based magazine whose first Issue has just been received. Farshi, a known modern Urdu poet, dedicates his journal to 'Shab Khoon'. His editorial note displays his firm commitment to keep it in view as a role model for his journal.

Times have changed and new trends, issues and discussions are emerging. Our fresh literary magazines, catering to the new paradigms, are no less promising and impressive than the old ones. So the wheel moves on!

Thirty-six years after Jean-Paul Sartre's death, the story of his first meeting with Simone de Beauvoir is as interesting as any fiction might be. Beauvoir was a fellow student of Sartre at the Sorbonne University, the youngest in the class and already thought of as an extraordinary student. Sartre invited her to study with him for their oral exam. Their biographer Hazel Rowley writes, "On the designated afternoon Sartre waited in the tearoom, reading and smoking his pipe. He was taken aback when a fair-haired young woman walked up to him, introducing herself as Helene de Beauvoir, and explained that her sister was unable to come. 'How did you know that I was Sartre?' he asked. Poupette, as everyone called her, looked sheepish."

Sartre thought he knew why Simone had not turned up and could guess how she had described him to her younger sister. He was right. Beauvoir had told Poupette that she would have no trouble in recognising Sartre. He was extremely short, he wore glasses, and he was "very ugly".

What brought Simone and Sartre closer was the joint study they undertook together. Simone, her boyfriend Maheu and Sartre decided to study together at Sartre's tiny student room. Hazel Rowley writes, "Beauvoir was taken aback by the filth of Sartre's tiny student room. There were cigarette butts on the floor and the air was thick with stale body odor and tobacco fumes. Books and papers were piled everywhere and satirical sketches were stuck on the walls." Beauvoir had mastered Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics. In the final results of the exam she gave Sartre a tough competition and the jury had a hard time deciding who should be declared the first. But the verdict came in favor of Sartre. Maheu was already a married by then. during this process Beauvoir and Sartre became closer.

It is generally assumed that it was Sartre who transformed Beauvoir from a dutiful daughter of the French bourgeoisie into an independent freethinker. But she was on this route much before she met Sartre. Under the influence of writers like Andre Gide, Paul Valery and Maurice Barres she was in revolt against the hypocrisy of her class. At the age of 19 she was already questioning marriage on ethical grounds. She wrote in her journal, "For me a choice is never made, it is always being made... The horror of the definitive choice is that it engages not only the self of today but that of tomorrow which is why basically marriage is immoral."

Sartre and Beauvoir discussed his theory of liberty and contingency. Sartre thought that individuals lived in a state of fundamental absurdity or 'contingency'. Life has no pre-existing meaning. Each individual has to assume his freedom, create his own life. There is no natural order; people hold their destinies in their own hands. It was therefore up to them to determine the substance of their lives, even the way they chose to love. They talked a good deal about their future. Sartre did not suggest marriage, but rather a period of 'lease' for two years to start with while he was doing military service. After two years, they were still undecided about their future. Sartre was not the monogamous type, and both of them cherished their freedom. Beauvoir, who went on to write 'The Second Sex', was of the opinion that in contemporary society women were not equal but inferior to men and marriage authenticates this fact. They wanted their relationship to be on an entirely different footing.

After finishing his military duty Sartre started his teaching career in a school in Le Havre. According to Hazel Rowley, "his students in Le Havre had never met any one like Sartre. They were fascinated by this small, round man who turned up to school in an old tweed jacket -- no tie -- sat on the front desk, his legs swinging in the air, and threw ideas around... he never failed the students and almost never gave them below average grades... he told them he had few possessions and no interest in material acquisitions."

Sartre's novel 'Nausea' was published in 1938 and was hailed as "one of the distinctive work of our time." A year later war was in the air but Sartre was assuring his colleagues that it would not come. On September 1,1939, Hitler's troops marched into Poland and a general mobilisation was ordered in Paris. Sartre reported at the mobilisation depot and was assigned to the meteorological company, where he had ample time to write the first part of his trilogy, 'Age of Reason'. The other two parts, 'Reprieve' and 'Iron in the Soul', were completed later. But the real war had yet to come. In1940 the Nazis entered France. Sartre was imprisoned and then freed after eleven months by the Nazis. Back in Paris,Sartre who was aligned to the left, lost no time in forming a resistance group. Thus began his political activism.

In his essay 'Paris under Occupation', Sartre described what it felt like to live in a city occupied by the Nazis. During his imprisonment he had written and produced plays. Now he wrote his famous play 'The Flies', which conveyed a covert message of resistance through Greek mythology. It was a great success. During this period he got introduced to Albert Camus. The friendship lasted several years, till they fell apart because Albert Camus didn't approve of Sartre's support of Stalinism. Camus died in a car accident in 1960. France was freed in 1944 when de Gaulle marched into Paris.

In 1945 Sartre's and Beauvoir's names were everywhere. Existentialism had become a buzzword. One evening, when Sartre arrived to speak on 'Is Existentialism a Humanism', he was taken aback to see a vast crowd milling outside the hall. It took him quite some time to battle his way through the mob to reach the podium. He roared, "We are not born cowardly or lazy; we choose to be these things. Man is responsible for what he is... We are alone without excuses. This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free."

His book 'Being and Nothingness' became a fashionable book, especially among the youth. Communists blamed him for being a nihilist and conservatives called him godless and depraved.

During the Cold war, Sartre held to the view that Americans were the aggressors and the Soviet Union wanted peace. Sartre and Beauvoir were among 121 French intellectuals to sign the Manifesto of 121, demanding independence for Algeria and amnesty for all French soldiers who refused to take up arms against Algerian people. There were death threats against Sartre. Five thousand war veterans paraded down the Champs Elysees shouting 'shoot Sartre'. Sartre's house was attacked with a plastic explosive device. Beauvoir's life was also in danger, for writing in defense of Algerian Muslim FLN member Djamila Boupacha. De Gaulle, when asked to press charges against Satre and others, declared, "You do not imprison Voltaire."

'Words' was published in 1964, the same year Sartre was nominated for the Nobel prize in Literature, which he refused to receive.

Sartre felt outraged when America started bombing North Vietnam in 1965. Two years later both Sartre and de Beauvoir participated in the Famous Bertrand Russell Tribunal for war crimes. A change in Sartre's thinking occurred when Soviet Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, which he considered a criminal act. Now he became more interested in the Maoist Movement. He liked their rejection of elitism, hierarchies, and leaders. He liked the Maoist idea that intellectuals should listen to the masses and follow them rather than attempt to lead them. Sartre had always had an interest in the Israel-Palestine issue, and while he thought that Israel had a right to exist the Palestinians also had an equal right to Palestine. In this connection a meeting took place between Edward Said ,the famous Palestinian intellectual, and Sartre in 1979, when the latter was 74, in troubled health problems and entirely dependent on his Jewish secretary. Said got disillusioned to see that his "intellectual hero had succumbed in his late years to such a reactionary mentor." Sartre died in 1980. His death made front-page news around the word. His funeral procession was a huge event in Paris with hundreds of thousands of his admirers, mostly youth, showering flowers on his coffin. Beauvoir died six years after Sartre, and her ashes were buried in in Sartre's tomb.

When he left Oxford, in a blaze of glory, he spent all his time in making a name for himself in London's professional theatre. An highly unsuccessful Hamlet put an end to that ambition. Harold Lang, the actor, used to say that of all the things Ken aspired to, acting was what he coveted most. "That didn't work out for him quite; it only accentuated his stammer. He would never have been noticed as an actor."

Perhaps Tynan realised it. He turned to what he knew best: writing. The critical pieces he had written for the Oxford magazines (Isis and Cherwell) had already endeared him to London editors. He was engaged by the Evening Standard to cover the theatre. The Standard had a policy that no editorial, and certainly no review, should be more than 300 words. This was not because there was a paper shortage; the financial managers of the newspaper believed that if there were fewer words in the feuilleton there would be more space for advertising. Tynan's notices were a model of precis writing.

When Ivor Brown, the long-standing Drama Critic of the Observer, retired, the job was offered to Tynan. In the mid-fifties, The Sunday Observer was by far the most prestigious newspaper in England. As the Observer critic, he ruled the waves of English theatre. He lashed out at the inane, shopworn, sentimental stuff that was dished out in the West-End. He became the scourge of producers and managements. He was caustic, impertinent and achingly witty. He wrote with a depth of knowledge and a facility for language that made the theater-goers at once discerning and passionate.

Tynan's standard of good critism was that it was not the opinion that counted so much as the art with which it was expressed. You can marvel at his art in nearly every review he ever wrote. Dissecting the work of that master of anonymity, Alec Guinness, whom he describes as the "inventor of an obsequious magic", he writes:

He is the nocturnal burglar, the humble Houdini who knows the combination. He does everything by stealth. He has illumined many a blind alley of subtlety, but blazed no trails. Guinness waves away awe with a witty fingerlip and deflects the impending holocaust with a shrug... Whether he likes it or not (and I suspect he does) his true metier will continue to be eccentrics -- men reserved, blinkered, shut off from their fellows and obsessed.

What comes across from the above piece is not just his immaculate style matched by his wit and his verbal brilliance, but also his tremendous enthusiasm for his subject. Over and above everything else, Tynan possesses the imaginative 'know how' without which, neither a writer nor a painter can become a genius.

His 'profile' studies are simply brilliant. After meeting Charles Laughton over breakfast in a London hotel, he recalls, "He walks top-heavily like a salmon standing on its tail. Laughton invests his simplest exit with an atmosphere of furtive flamboyance. He left the hotel for all the world like an absconding banker. He took leave of me in the manner of a butler begging an afternoon off."

Harold Lang, whom I mentioned earlier, had been closely associated with Tynan in the days when he came down from Oxford to try his luck in London. He had co-authored a Radio play with Tynan which was broadcast over the BBC. (They were an odd combination: Tynan, the sophisticated bright light of Oxford, a dramaturge manque, who knew his Plantus and Plutarch, even before he was a teen-ager. Lang, a Jewish Puck from the East End, a jobbing actor with no academic qualifications except a supreme intelligence and cocky wit).

The two of them had planned to present a session of avant-garde plays in London, but managements were shy of such a venture and nothing came of it. Harold Lang had a wonderful ear for music and speech. He could do Tynan perfectly. Even now I cannot think of Tynan without recalling Harold Lang's rendering of his voice, gestures and inflections.

I didn't meet Tynan through Harold Lang. He suggested it once or twice, but I did not show any enthusiasm. It was not because I didn't want to be introduced as 'Harold's dusky prince' -- that's what Lang called me, jokingly -- I felt shy about meeting someone who was generally acknowledged to be an intellectual giant. Also, he had given me, on two occasions, such excellent reviews that I felt he might not find me as lumininous as he had made me out to be. He had described me as "an Anthony Quinn in the body of Laurence Olivier".

Chance brought us together in a BBC recording studio. He was just coming out, having finished his recording as I was ushered in. He asked me if I was going to be in London for a week or two and could he have my address. Within two or three days I received his invitation to dinner.

Tynan's Mayfair flat was spacious and carelessly elegant. I soon found out that he was a movie buff and that we shared a liking for the Western, especially the one which had been dubbed as a B movie -- the cliche-ridden seventy-two minute fare in which the 'Injuns' had to be wiped out and the county sheriff turned out to be crooked towards the end. He was an excellent host and his cellar had some of the best vintage stuff.

A few years later, I met him again when he was visiting London to do a piece on the seemier pubs of London. He was now writing regularly for The New Yorker and living most of the time in America. The profiles he wrote for the New Yorker are some of the best pieces of prose I have ever read.

We spent a long evening. His protuberant eyes now seemed to be rotating all the time. "The theatre in London", he drawled, was "like an unattractive whore." Broadway was even more tiresome. "Oh Zee, why do you cling to the Shakespeherian rag?" I was at the time about to begin rehearsing 'The Merchant'. "The revelation of the human body -- that's what matters," he declared.

His current partner chided him for not getting up to replenish my glass. He got up and said, "I am flawed, tragically flawed." And then, his stammer getting worse, he wanted to know why I wished to live in a dreary place like England. "Come over to America and we'll all go and live in the Mojave desert -- the only sane part left on the face of this earth."

Tynan died young. Nearly all of his works are out of print now. It is a sad reflection of our times that most people today remember Kenneth Tynan only as the man who introduced the 'f' word on television.

(concluded)