Let me begin with some lines from a song I have known since my younger days: “If there were dreams to sell, / Merry or sad to tell, / And the crier rang the bell, / What would you buy?”
Actually, I should be quoting Noon Meem Rashid and Muneer Niazi in this attempt to dabble in the realm of dreams and ideas, but I feel unable to readily translate their heartwarming verse into English. And I have not learnt to seek assistance from any AI application.
However, I do concede that Noom Meem Rashid and Muneer Niazi, with a few of their poems ringing in my mind, would be more relevant when I am mainly writing about the eighteenth Aalmi Urdu Conference that began in Karachi on Thursday. This has been the flagship venture of the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, and the pride of its dynamic president Ahmed Shah.
One remarkable feature of this four-day festival is that it brings together the largest and the most authentic congregation of Urdu writers, poets and intellectuals from not just across the country but also from all over the world. After all, the Urdu diaspora is organically intertwined with contemporary Urdu literature and a number of noted writers are settled in faraway countries. This conference may be seen as a place of pilgrimage for them.
In addition, we have some prominent writers of other Pakistani languages at this celebration, as the Urdu conference has special sessions on these languages.
Now, what do you do with all these creative individuals assembled in the lively locale of the Arts Council? For me, this is an excellent opportunity to meet them on the sidelines, share thoughts with them, laugh with them, and, why not, rant about something or someone at the dinner table.
This means that the real gift of a conference of this magnitude is what is possible beyond the formal sessions. In some ways, this is where the action is. During my heyday as a journalist, I had the opportunity to attend some international conferences. I remember little of the formal proceedings. But I still tell stories of what had happened on the sidelines. And it was not entirely of a trivial nature. There were many serious discussions on contentious issues in those casual encounters.
One reason I am emphasising the informal exchange of ideas as the highlight of this literary festival is that it is not possible for me to do proper reportage on the proceedings across a wide variety of issues. Just an inventory of the delegates, well-known in their own fields, would run out of the space I have left in this column.
Another excuse could be that, though some panellists, delving into social and political controversies, are more candid in their presentations than they would be in the mainstream media, a sense of restraint is still obvious. Hence, what remains unsaid is very likely to reverberate in conversations that continue after a session. There is a free flow of exchange of thoughts and ideas in the lobbies and the dining area.
What may be very intrusive for the leading lights of Urdu literature is being mobbed by their admirers, who want pictures or selfies with them. It happens mostly when the dignitaries step down from the rostrum. But the opportunity for the audience to mingle with literary, media and entertainment personalities should also be considered a positive attribute of the conference.
Such a large gathering of public figures from the world of literature, art and culture would naturally cause a stir in Karachi’s social circles. Writers invited from other cities and countries have friends and relatives in the city, and there is pressure on them to attend private parties.
By the way, the four-day conference will culminate late on Sunday, that is tonight, with a qawwali session, which has become a hallmark of the Aalmi Urdu Conference. This will be staged after a formal concluding session. Coincidentally, the conference has overlapped with two significant dates that bear on our history.
December 25, apart from being Christmas, is the birth anniversary of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. December 27 is the anniversary of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Both occasions have rightfully been observed with special sessions. This would be a certification of the fact that art and literature cannot be disengaged from the politics of the country. I am reminded of those famous words of the romantic poet Shelley: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
Shelley said this in a work of prose. When I invoked the importance of dreams at the outset of this column, I had in my mind the role that writers and poets play in a living society. They teach us to dream by influencing our hearts and minds.
I need to mention that the theme of this Aalmi Urdu Conference is ‘Jashn-e-Pakistan’, with a focus on the contributions of our literary legends. But the scope of many presentations is very wide, incorporating all shades of the intellectual pursuit.
Since the conference is being held in the last week of the year, the mood is both sad and happy. The tone, in a sense, was set in the inaugural session. After speeches by the chief guest, Sindh Governor Kamran Tessori and President of the Arts Council Ahmed Shah, the keynote address was presented by Nasir Abbas Nayyar, our leading critic who also writes fiction. Iftikhar Arif, arguably our most prominent living poet, made his remarks primarily on the sanctity and worth of the mother tongue of all our people.
To conclude, here are some words spoken by the keynote speaker, translated into English. He said: “Our literature needs to engage in a dialogue with the whole world. We should accept that despite having our own identity in literature, we are not recognised on a global scale. World literature creates a symphony and we don’t have our musical note in it”.
The writer is a senior journalist.
He can be reached at: [email protected]
