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Jaipur’s high-decibel literature festival ends with a bang

The star-studded panel — comprising poet Anne Waldman, Ashutosh Varney, journalist Luke Harding, lyricist Prasoon Joshi, Parliamentarians Swapan Dasgupta and Shashi Tharoor, and man of all seasons (also ZeeJLF sessions, given the many he’s been part of) Suhel Seth — had journalist Barkha Dutt as the moderator.

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North Korean defector Hyeonseo Lee speaks at one of the sessions
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The 10th edition of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (ZeeJLF) ended on a deafening note on Monday evening with the grand debate, ‘We are living in a Post-truth World’, turning into a high-decibel fractious affair. The star-studded panel — comprising poet Anne Waldman, Ashutosh Varney, journalist Luke Harding, lyricist Prasoon Joshi, Parliamentarians Swapan Dasgupta and Shashi Tharoor, and man of all seasons (also ZeeJLF sessions, given the many he’s been part of) Suhel Seth — had journalist Barkha Dutt as the moderator.

Dasgupta laid the ground when he said that “post truth” was a phrase “peddled by losers who thought they were repositories of knowledge but couldn’t garner public support”. “It gained currency post Brexit and Donald Trump winning the US elections, thanks to the people who lost out on popular support and wanted to manipulate the narrative,” he said. Dasgupta accused Harding of not having the credibility to criticise Putin and Trump.

Tharoor said lies had been peddled in all ages and added that there could be multiple truths. He cited the Indian scriptures that talked about lack of certitude, and emphasised “grayness”. But Waldman rammed in with a barrage of facts about global warming and its consequences, and ridiculed Trump for calling it a Chinese plot. Mainstream and social media received a hard thrashing from some panelists who talked about how lies today could be circulated easily through such platforms.
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The ZeeJLF session titled ‘The Girl with Seven Names’, named after the book authored by North Korean defector Hyeonseo Lee, left the audience unsettled as she narrated her harrowing experiences in the dictatorial regime. Lee fled to China only to encounter a thriving sex trade, from which she was lucky to escape unscathed. About 40,000 women who fled to China became victims of the sex racket, even as they faced threats of deportation, she said to an unusually quiet audience. Lee, however, was surprisingly calm as she recounted the hardships she faced in both the countries, most tellingly in North Korea, where deprivation and repression went hand-in-hand.  
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There is no escaping Bollywood at ZeeJLF. ‘Mother India: Indian Films and National Narrative’, featuring filmmakers Imtiaz Ali and Sudhir Mishra and writer Rachel Dwyer, looked at how the cinema of different eras reflected the ethos of the day and contributed to nation-building. The conversation settled on the multiplicity of perspectives on nation-building and how the strains of the parallel cinema movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s had been carried forward in the films of Ali, Mishra, Vishal Bhardwaj and Anurag Kashyap.
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ZeeJLF sessions can be explosive affairs, and ‘Being the Other’, the morning session on the increasing marginalisation of the Muslim community in India and communal ill-feeling, was more explosive than most. Journalist Saeed Naqvi, whose recent book supplied the title of the session, spoke about how the Awadhi culture of Lucknow, where he grew up, was a seamless social and cultural amalgam between communities, which had been disrupted by politics. Sadia Dehlvi, the author of a book on Sufism, spoke about how Sufism was the heart of Islam and petro-dollars had been the biggest cause of Islam’s global problems. British-Pakistani novelist Qaisra Shahraz spoke about how Muslims in the West were “caught between two monsters — ISIS and Islamophobia”. Women, she said, were the particular victims of such prejudice, denied the right to hold an opinion on “whether to wear the niqab, whether to take it off”.

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