Ismat Chughtai: A Beguiling Short Story Writer By Mohammad Aleem Two Urdu short story writers fascinate and exhilarate me the most. And, it is not very difficult to assume these two names, one, Sadat Hasan Manto and another, Ismat Chughtai. Both have immense creative power to attract and allure the millions of readers on the globe with their powerful, lively, beautiful and enchanting stories. Even in this age of technology and fast surfing internet, they command huge respect. The question arises here naturally that what makes them bewitching even in the presence of thousands of other writers of almost the same caliber. The world is not devoid of good and great writers, but surely, the writers like Manto and Ismat are not so many. What makes me sad to think that in Urdu, now, a very few powerful stories appear these days. Why is it so? Where we actually lack? Are we less talented or we have not such power and grit to delve deep into the dirt of the society as these great writers used to do in their own time. Women have always been taken as the most suppressed and oppressed being in the society. Even in this so called modern day, we find innumerable examples of their exploitations. Of late, a debate has been going on in the newspapers and television channels that how the triple Talaaq in one go is justified. No doubt, it hits hard to those women who are poor and illiterate, those women, who don’t know how to safeguard themselves from the onslaught of the brutality of