Curtain falls on 10th Karachi Literature Festival

As the existentialist philosophers say, “All good things have to come to an end”, and so it was the case with the 10th Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) which concluded on Sunday after three days of an invigorating intellectual exercise.

The KLF, which was a brainchild of Ameena Saiyid, former managing director, of Oxford University Press (Pakistan), really flowered into an event to reckon with and today tops the calendar of Karachi’s cultural activities.

The meticulously manicured lawns of Beach Luxury Hotel with a gentle Arabian sea blowing therein was the setting of the closing speeches.

Arshad Saeed Hussain, the OUP managing director, said in his closing speech that things at the venue from the next day would be back to the same as there would be no marquees, no chairs and the rooms in which sessions were held would return to their routine business again; however, the only difference would be that each of us would experience a tremendous increase in our wisdom due to the knowledge we gained in the two-and-a-half days of the festival.

“The KLF is not just an event. It is a movement,” said Hussain. Adviser to the Prime Minister Dr Ishrat Husain tendered some advice in regard to our economic health in his closing speech. He congratulated the OUP on the successful conclusion of the festival.

He said that in this age of Twitter and WhatsApp, the OUP had done a marvellous job in inculcating the reading habit among our young people. “If you’ve been living the right way to keep your body fit, you won’t need to go to the doctor. Similarly, if we are doing the right thing economically, we shall not need to go to the IMF.”

India and Bangladesh, he said, had also gone to the IMF but then tightened their belts and hadn’t gone back since. Bangladesh had experienced a growth of six to seven per cent and a decline in the population growth rate of only 1.5 per cent, Dr Husain said.

In our case, the adviser to the PM said, the electricity distribution companies had accumulated losses of Rs1.4 billion. As for the Pakistan Steel, for the last many years, we have been paying salaries and perks to the staff without producing even an ounce of steel, he added.

“We have to purge our institutions of incapable personnel and induct staff of high integrity,” Dr Husain remarked, adding that the private sector which was not paying full taxes must be induced to do so.

The 21st century, he said, was going to be a knowledge economy and as such we had to dispense with rote learning and the current examination system and usher in analytical and creative thinking.

Biographer and researcher Deborah Baker in her keynote address spoke about her contacts with a Multan youth, Abdullah Hussain, by corresponding with whom she had got to know so much about Islam and Pakistan.

The other keynote speaker, journalist and rights activist IA Rehman, speaking in really chaste Urdu, lauded the two co-founders of the KLF, Ameena Saiyid and Dr Asif Aslam Farrukhi.

The KLF, he said, had enabled the organisations like the human rights movement to speed up their mission. “The KLF has given impetus to literature in the various languages of Pakistan,” he said, adding that it was a great achievement.

It was on account of the KLF that festivals like the Hyderabad Literature Festival and the Faisalabad Literature Festival were instituted, the journalist said. He advised the government to give up on the idea of clamping on free speech. The closing ceremony was rounded off with a performance by Pepsi Battle of the Bands.