Debates, dance performance held on 2nd day of Faiz Festival

LAHORE: The second day of Faiz Festival opened with four events—a dance performance by a private school, a session on ‘Keeping the Living Heritage Alive, Oonchi rakhain lau’ with Salima Hashmi, Danish Hussain and Atul Tewari from India, moderated by Mahtab Rashidi, ‘Up, close and personal with Navid Shahzad’ and translation of Pablo Neruda’s poems.

Salima Hashmi said, “We have become callous with words.” She wants to come back to 1984 when her father died. “If Faiz is a living heritage, then there should be work on taking it forward,” she said and recalled how her mother Alys Faiz would take care of Faiz’s things and say, ‘they belong to people’. This is living ‘virsa’,” she said. “All cultural work is political work. We found that people were thirsty for cultural activities when we first held Mela in Bagh-e-Jinnah. Through art we understand the times. Remember what happened in 1971?” She recalled a poem of Faiz that pictures what happened to the nation at that time”.

Speaking on heritage, Atul Tewari, who has to his credit conceiving and establishing the largest museum dedicated to an individual. It is in Gujarat named after Mahatma Gandhi. He said, “There is tangible heritage and intangible heritage and it is important to save both. It is most likely we have overlooked a good part of it. I am not a trained curator, an archaeologist or an architect. Museums are becoming story-telling mediums. Surfing is possible only when there are waves.” Museums are not just picture gallery. Gandhi was a man of few things. “When Gandhi came to India from South Africa in 1915, he was advised to travel across India. He took the train and traveled through the country for five years. The museum has put a carriage like the one in 1915 in the museum and has developed a ten-minute visual story of what Gandhi saw and experienced during the travels. Visitors to the museums go through the audio-visual stories that leave a strong impression on them.”

Tewari sees danger in the political and religious indoctrination. “Gandhi said a nation that cannot unite cannot be successful. He was killed when he was on hunger strike because he said it was important to hold urs at Bakhtiar Kaki’s tomb,” he recalled.

Danish Husain who is famous for Daastan Goi and stage plays, said, “There is nothing fixed, nothing pure. Things remain in a flux, a flow, so is language. Whatever knowledge we have, we pass on through language so language needs to be kept alive. If something goes out of public memory, it is a loss.”

Danish said, “Artificial intelligence chat GBD will produce a poem like that of W.B Yeats but the human experience is irreplaceable. There is no alternative to that. We are social animals.”

Mehtab Rashidi who was moderating the session on ‘Keeping the Living Heritage Alive’ lamented that schools today do not understand the importance of mother-tongue. People are speaking English with their children at home. Many children find Urdu foreign, in that they don’t read. Soon they will forget to speak their mother tongue if people continue to ignore their own language and prefer to speak English at home, she said and put a question to Salima Hashmi as to what changes she proposed in syllabus, to which Salima said, “Thinking now in terms of cultural studies has become much more important. We are all different and it is important to understand that,” she concluded.

Another session titled ‘The ones we saw’ in which Arifa Syeda spoke to the audience while Noorul Hasan was the moderator, was well received. Zehra Nigah was supposed to be in conversation with Arifa Syeda but she could not reach from Karachi for health reasons, it was learnt. Arifa Syeda got a standing ovation and Hall 1 of Alhamra was packed to capacity with the stairs all full of people. She talked about Faiz, Ghalib, Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum, Ustad Daman, Nasir Kazmi, Madam Noor Jahan, Zia Mohyeddin and Amjad Islam Amjad.

Faiz learnt from Ghalib and in some ways he got ahead of Ghalib, she said. Of Zia Mohyeddin, she said nobody has served Urdu like him in this country. He has increased the prestige of Urdu. He performed on every 31st of December for 33 years. Of Amjad Islam Amjad, she said his poetry is of high quality like that of Iqbal and Ghalib.

“I have three loves; one is named Urdu, the other is Lahore and the third is Pakistan. Now Lahore has less Lahoris here. I have found this city truly generous,” she concluded.

The three halls of Alhamra, the Adabi Baithak, the art gallery and the lawns were full of people. Jadunama—a session in which there was conversation between Adeel Hashmi and poet Javed Akhtar from India also drew a great number of people to it.