The difference between satire and humour, I suppose, is that whereas the latter treats the given organisation of the society as basically satisfactory, the former does not. I, being lazy, tend to be tolerant of both the conditions, though, of course, there are some human acts which are not admissible in any society worth the name. Still I prefer Horace to Ovid. He was not as great a poet. But his ability to overlook difficulties and enjoy a friend's company has ensured his survival, e.g.: "My dear Maecenas, thou shalt drink with me/In modest goblets my vin ordinaire/Which I laid down the year they gave to thee/The acclamation in the theatre..." In satire, his most famous piece is about his chance meeting with a bore, while on a street, walking. Horace does his best to get rid of him but, then, gives up: "There as he stood, impassive as a clod/I pull at his limp arms, frown, wink and nod/To urge him to release me. With a smile/He feigns stupidity: I burn with bile." The trouble is, as Qurratul Ain Hyder says, that every culture has its own "secret language", which only the members of that culture understand. Therefore, in drinking from another culture, we get only distilled water. Apparently only scientific writing, at best literary criticism, can cross the barrier of language. Even sentiments, which are, presumably, common to all, come dressed in outlandish clothes. Of course we have no comparable satire. Horace lived in the first century BC while Urdu became a recognisable language only in the seventeenth century AD. And our satire was born two hundred years later, entirely under the influence of English. Moreover, being written in a colonial country, with a society riven by external currents, it has a special bitterness to it. The humour of my friend, Sibte Akhtar, is pure. It seems he expels all worries, all politics from the room as he sits down to write. His Story of Socrates: "As the people know, I respect Socrates a lot, even more than myself. I may insult myself once in a while, but Socrates never. In fact, I have already mentioned in my book that Socrates drank hemlock for the sake of truth. (p 146) Actually, I too have longed to speak the truth. But awareness of Socrates' fate has kept me from it. A number of times, I tried, when alone, to persuade myself to blurt out the truth, saying to myself who would hear me here, but never gathered the courage to actually utter it, because, as they say 'the walls have ears'. If some wall heard me, I would not be able to show my face to anyone." And his satire: "The motor-cyclist could have changed streets on the U-turn, which would have taken him maybe one extra minute. But he decided upon crossing through the narrow cutting in the island. He broke the rules to gain an extra minute, without giving thought that, this way, he was posing a menace to the life of a person who was crossing the street according to the rules. But the cyclist knew that life on this earth was short. Every second counted, what to say of a minute. So he saved the minute." But isn't satire the weapon of the weak? The writer is a former ambassador