Karachi literary festival was a big success

The OUP and British Council sponsored a two-day literary festival in Karachi. It was a welcome event to popularise literature. True that Chennai and Jaipur Literary Festivals in India are a world apart in format and purpose, but the Karachi festival was also a highly significant events.
The driving force behind Jaipur Literary Festival meant much more than a mere Literary Festival. According to them India has arrived on the transnational arena of literature & Indian Commerce and Industry is fully behind to drive home the point that India has to offer a great deal to the world.
In a country where everything Indian is to be envied and copied the OUP-British Council move can be treated as quite innovative because it doesn't enjoy the support and collaboration of an inept Pakistani bourgeois. It is pity that our tycoons, included in the Claudia Craggs' work The New Maharajahs,' don't attach any importance to literature & culture. The event which was attended by some well-known figures of English and Urdu literature threw up opportunities for cross-fertilisation and better understanding among a section of writers whose appeal is essentially confined to popular English literature.
However, panel discussions and solo presentations have shown that some of Indian writers, both popular and serious, have begun to take 300 million strong middle class a bit seriously. Some English writers' books are being pirated. The writers of Pakistan can't think of this kind of piracy for their works in Pakistan as there is no readership. The writers of the Urdu at least would deem themselves privileged if they manage to sell 500 copies of their works. I remember an Indian writer Dalip Singh told me that a successful book could make a western writer millionaire; the opposite is true in our case. The writers have to indulge in vanity publications of their works and their wives have to raise alarm at seeing their cherished savings going down the drain with each publication. What have we achieved after all inspite of the rising trend of enlightened corpus of literature except the rising graph of fundamentalism and ethnic style. This phenomenon may be termed tragic. Books like 'Maut Ke Bad Kiya Hoga', Zaid Hamid's outburst against Hinduism and fundamentalists unending race to make us a laughing stock in the world cannot give any conscientious Pakistan a legitimate cause for pride. I am sadly reminded of ex-Ambassador Amin Naim Jan's book "The Horizons of Knowledge" that Pakistan has been included in the technically dead country intellectually. It is for the above reason that we need more and more encouragement to writers and books regardless of their being progressive or non-progressive.
What a dismal scene we have to begin with. We need more and more patient ears to listen to sensible words. We don't need post-modern diatribes against humanism, essentialism and enlightenment because we have hardly entered the industrial age. We are not as yet ready to digest Solon's and discourse (600 BC) on democratic dispensation. We are not quite familiar with Magna Carta (1215 AD) & Bill of Rights (1680 AD), let alone with UDHR (1945). Alas! We don't have any such development.
Hence, our stage of social development requires a specific prescription. We can't pick up the western movements societal or literary as a universal prescription for our social system.
I welcome OUP-British Council's two day event-no matter more of us would like to read Richard Burton's 'One thousands and one Nights', the 'Last Mughal' and 'the White Mughal' and the Best of Khuswant Singh. No matter some Pakistani origin writers of English have seen Pakistan with the western bias and they seem to have a 'foreign; brief to deliver but their works also need sympathetic reading.
Quite a few distinguished writers like Hanif Kureishi, Shobha De, William Dalayrample-writer of such books as the Last Mughal and the White Mujghal and the City of Djinns also figured in festivals' programmes Shaista Ikramullah's Koshish-e-Nataman (An discomplete Effort) and Vikram Seth's recital of a poem were some of the interesting features. Vikram Seth also read out a versification of Ghalib's to Yousuf Mirza, his younger brother.
A session on Literary criticism was also held with Maniza Naqvi as its moderation. The panelist were Hanif Kureishi, Muneeza Shamsie, Alok Bhalla and Stefan Weidner.
An interesting book launch by Ayesha Jalal "The Oxford Companion to Pakistani History". Hammed Haroon had to point out that Ayesha Jalal's book had omitted or dismissed certain important names. The two day literary event gathered some 140 authors to attend the festival, much more than last year's 90 and the first festival's 30. Yet the fact remains' that the Urdu and other Pakistani languages writers were ignored because of the dominant pro neo-liberal and non-progressive trends of the festival. The absence of some top progressive writers of Pakistan could be described unfortunate because their presence at the farway end of the Clifton could result in a more representative message from the custodians of Pakistan's forward-looking progressive heritage.