LAHORE
Three-day Lahore Literary Festival (LLF) 2016, which was to start from Friday (today), with an expected number of over 40,000 visitors from all around the country and abroad, has been forced to be relocated, rescheduled on Saturday morning and cut short to two days, due to security concerns.
According to information provided by the organisers of the festival and by the independent sources to The News on Thursday, the festival will start on Feb 20 (Saturday) at 9am at a local hotel instead of 11am as per the earlier schedule and will conclude on Sunday. “The festival will now only be held on two days instead of three owing to security concerns, one of the sources in the LLF told The News.
The source on the condition of anonymity revealed: “Originally, this year’s festival was scheduled to commence on Friday, February 19 and all the arrangements had been finalised as per the schedule.
We were informed by the authorities concerned on Thursday that we are not allowed to hold the Festival at Alhamra Arts Council and will also have to curtail it to two days rather than the initially decided three days span. The change has been made on the advice of the Punjab government.”
It is pertinent to note that the organisers of the Festival have been running around in a frenzy to find an alternate venue for such a mega event which has hosted around 40,000 thousand people from Pakistan and many other countries of the world. The eleventh hour change not only disturbed the organisers but it also created a great deal of confusion for the participants, guests and the visitors alike since most of the LLF fans did not have any concrete information about the fate of the LLF till late Thursday evening.
One of the organisers in the LLF told The News that the greatest challenge and a setback as well has come in the form of the change of venue. He said finding a befitting venue for such mammoth gathering was a herculean task for the LLF people. After a great struggle, they managed to secure a booking at a hotel on the Mall which is too small for such a big event compared to Alhamra Arts Council, he said.
The source revealed coupled with the cutting down of festival’s time to two days forced the organisers to cancel many programmes and reducing the number of speakers.
“This is eventually going to take away the original flavour and the colour of the festival to a large extent”, the source concluded. According to the new schedule, renowned Indian film artist Sharmila Tagore will be the inaugural guest and speaker in the inaugural session of the festival while Hameed Haroon will be the moderator of the event.