Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 26

The two-day Khushwant Singh Literary Festival (KSLF) kicked off — with its first digital edition live from London — here today.

The theme of the fest is ‘No Man is an Island’. The lit fest highlights the ideals and values that the celebrated Indian author Khushwant Singh stood for. It also brings together authors and intellectuals, who share the same passion as him — humanity and human emotions irrespective of the manmade boundaries.

“It is not a world of different states, but a necklace of countries string together”, stresses Art Historian Vidya Dehejia in the inaugural session, justifying the need for looking beyond one religion, one nation and one culture. ‘A Rediscovery of India in 100 Objects’, her book and also the topic of the first session, was Vidya’s attempt at appealing to the non-specialist readers. She says: “Most of my books have serious research work but the book is born out of the sheer pleasure I feel talking about objects and what they convey.”

“There’s no Sanskrit word for pornography. Most of the naked figurines description came from monks and nuns, who have renounced materialistic possessions and desires,” Vidya adds as she addresses topics such as male gaze, artistic licence and female artistes from ancient history.

British author, biographer and historian, Victoria Schofield, who authored, ‘The Fragrance of Tears: Benazir my friend’, reads excerpt from her book. She said: “Writing the book was never planned but a journalist in me kept preserving mementos because for me primary accounts always held a lot of value. But the news of her assassination shook me to the core. Having lived with her, been to the family graveyard, it was heartbreaking to visit her back in 2010 when her husband was in power.”

On the other hand, Shaheen informs the viewers how his book, The Grandaughter Project, was about four main characters, but his publisher told him to cut down to three — one is a holocaust survivor, then there’s Kamla, who grew up in Bengal famine and the last one is a migrant from Caribbean, who arrives to London in a banana boat.