6th KLF kicks off calling on all writers to rise despite troubled times

Nayantara Sehgal regrets how politics has crept into private lives

KARACHI:

For the sixth year in a row, book lovers in the city will be able to stalk their favourite writers and pester them to sign their books. The sixth Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) kicked off on Friday evening.

As keynote speaker, Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece, Nayantara Sehgal, who is a writer herself, expressed the need for writers and readers to develop a comradeship in the current troubled times. Referring to Douglas Reed’s Insanity Fair, she pointed out how the title is still valid today as literature and creative arts are endangered. “The climate in which creative people live in is direct on a par with insanity,” she said.

She recalled how politics never used to interfere in private lives the way it does today. “Politics has intimately and painstakingly crept into private lives,” she said. “Writers have taken sides.”



Sehgal was addressing a crowd of literature enthusiast on a pleasant Friday evening at the Beach Luxury hotel, which is hosting the festival for the third time. Earlier, Oxford University Press managing director Ameena Saiyid inaugurated the festival - a word, she stressed, is the operative one as it was not a conference or a convention. “We want our authors to have voice, visibility, and readership and to be treated like the celebrities they are,” she said. “I believe KLF will make Karachi a better place to live and, along with it, the rest of the country.”

KLF co-founder Asif Farrukhi shed some light on the festival’s journey so far and the situation of Karachi. “Be a part of this jashan-e-adab because we are not going to bow down,” he said.

Ghazi Salahuddin, who was representing the ‘I Am Karachi’ consortium, echoed the sentiments of nearly every resident of the city — how there are times when you mourn the city and then there are more times when you celebrate it.

Poet Zehra Nigah shared with the audience her association with the world of literature. “There was once a time when couples used to gift books to each other as a token of their love,” she said. “If they wanted to make it more special, they would underline and mark the exact sentences for more impact. This was before the mobile phones, of course,” she added.

Friday evening also marked the announcement of the KLF Best Fiction Book Price 2015, which was given to Shandana Minhas for Survival Tips for Lunatics. KLF Coca Cola Best Non-Fiction Book Price 2015 was given to M Naeem Qureshi for Ottoman Turkey, Ataturk, and Muslim South Asia: Perspectives, Perceptions, and Responses.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 7^th, 2015.