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‘We did not wish to bring the virus to Kasauli hills’
The literati will miss the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival in the pristine environs of Kasauli; made in Mumbai it will be streamed online as Covid clouds still loom large
This year, the ninth edition of the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival comes without the soothing hill breeze, the pine trees and the elegant ambience of the famous Kasauli Club. While it is disheartening to the regular audience, they hope that it will return to the place where it belongs with time.
Brig Naveen Mahajan, station commander of army and the ex-officio president of the Cantonment Board, is said to have offered the co-directors of the festival, Rahul Singh and Niloufer Bilimoria, that the festival could be hosted in Kasauli this year too with appropriate social distancing.
“It was most generous of the Commander to make this offer but we thought that in times such as these we would not like to take the virus to the Kasauli hills,” Rahul said.
Talking about the three-day streaming of the festival, from October 9 to 11, Niloufer says: “In putting together the first digital edition of the festival, we decided to call it ‘A New Life’. The pandemic times offer us to mull over the sense of where we can go from here, so that we do not just go back to the normal.”
The festival has been packaged with thought to shun callous approach to nature and ecology that have caused the pandemic and move towards a green society and green economy.
The festival will open with engineer Sudha Murty’s talk on ‘The art of science and giving’ with writer Chetan Bahagat as the interlocutor. Other sessions include Pico Iyer speaking on ‘Staying at home and re-making the world’, Harsh Mander on the plight of migrants in ‘Locking down the poor’, Farid Zakaria will dwell on the 10 lessons to be learnt from the pandemic, Jono Linen on ‘Walking alone in the Himalayas’, Amitav Ghosh on ‘An Uninhibtable Earth’, and Shobha De on ‘Lockdown Des and Nites’.
Motorist Kishie Singh, who has been on the organising team of the festival from its first edition, says, “We will miss the festivity but caution is better than bravado and with time, the festival will return to the hill town which was the home for Khushwant Singh’s writings.”
