to read.

trying to keep The Team of People Assigned to Monitoring My Internet Activity busy, that's all.

"Early in the 1950s, Saadat Hasan Manto, arguably Pakistan's greatest prose writer, defined, almost inadvertently, a type of 'Ugly American' that the Cold War would fix in popular imaginations across Asia: the representative of the world's greatest superpower who, though superficially friendly and generous, pursues America's national interest at the expense of all other concerns; an often blundering figure who never ceases, while leaving destruction and chaos in his wake, to claim the highest virtue for his deeds. American cultural cold warriors, then clustered at a U.S. Information Services (USIS) offices, had approached Manto with a lucrative commission - write a short story for publication in an Urdu journal they subsidized - after he publicly ridiculed Pakistani camp followers of Stalin. Spurned by non-aligned India, the United States was trying to persuade Pakistan's generals, along with artists and writers, into joining its anti-Soviet crusade. The famously mercurial Manto insisted on taking less money than was offered by the Americans and then submitted, in place of the promised short story, a caustic 'Letter to Uncle Sam,' mocking America's claims to moral superiority over the Soviet Union."

"Dear Uncle," Manto wrote in one of the letters, "My admiration and respect for you are going up at about the same rate as your progress towards a decision to grant military aid to Pakistan."

from an article by Pankaj Mishra, titled "Dear Uncle Sam...Why do India and Pakistan see America in such opposite ways?"