Arts Council Youth Festival to kick off tomorrow

The Arts Council Youth Festival is set to begin on February 17, featuring a competition divided into 12 categories. Within that there will be two divisions: a junior under-20 category and a senior under-29 category.

The competition will comprise painting exhibitions, an Urdu declamation contest, declamation workshops, dance workshops, essay-writing competitions and workshops, singing competitions and theatre contests.

Announcing this to the mediafolk, Syed Ahmed Shah, president of the Arts Council, Karachi, said art and culture could not be divorced from society, and they were imperative to nurture a healthy, progressive and vibrant society.

Children, he said, had to be initiated into the activity right from the beginning. Unfortunately, he said, an overwhelming percentage of schoolchildren and young folk did not have the facility to be groomed in them.

It was the exclusive prerogative of the very pricy schools which fleeced the children in the name of quality education. This, over time, he said, had bred a savage, intolerant and illiterate society. Children, he said, were the main victims of this intolerance.

“Art and literature make one educated and humane,” Shah said. The Arts Council, he said, had been endeavouring to bridge the gap and that 17,500 boys and girls from the working class areas had been groomed.

Six months ago, he said, the Arts Council had initiated a mentorship programme whereby people who were trained at the Arts Council were sent out as trainers to schools. He said these programmes were totally free of any caste, colour, creed, or gender biases. Every category offers a prize of Rs100,000.

Shah said that unlike what they had initially apprehended, there was no opposition from parents or teachers to their programmes, even from the reputedly conservative segments of society. “If at all there was opposition, it was not more than .001 percent,” he said.