KARACHI: The fifth edition of the two-day Adab Festival under way at Habitt City concluded on Sunday with discussions on assorted issues of importance besides book launches and intellectual discourses on literature.

The most important issue here, which is also a pressing one of our times, was about the ‘Climate catastrophes in Pakistan: how to shockproof for the future’ with Dr Adil Najam, who among so many of his other responsibilities is also the president of WWF International, speaking to journalist and activist Aisha Sarwari. Ironically, it was included at the last minute by Lightstone Publishers, the event’s organisers, by taking half an hour away from an open mic session for all called ‘Let your hearts out’.

Just as well, because I would like to know whose idea it was to listen to amateurs telling boring old jokes and filmi songs. There were only a couple of people who read poetry to make one come back to the festival about literature. And only one of them read her own poem. The other read Iqbal.

Coming back to the ‘Climate catastrophes’ talk, which people had to wait for till the ridiculous open mic session could end (it could have at least been arranged first), Dr Najam sportingly and jokingly pointed out that “climate is a boring topic, but also a very important topic.”

Adab Festival concludes with discussions on assorted issues, book launches

He said that Pakistan has many issues, political, economical, issues due to our geographic location but an honest analysis would tell you that if there is an existential problem, it is climate. “The other issues are also important but they are reversible. Climate is not reversible,” he said.

“You park your car in the sun and lock it up before leaving it for a bit. When you return it is so hot from inside that you cannot get back into it until you open its windows to let that heat escape. This is how heat is trapped in your world due to things such as carbon emissions and greenhouse gases. And the world doesn’t have windows like your car,” he explained.

“Pakistan does not produce so much pollution. People say that we didn’t do this, so whoever really is responsible should fix it. That’s the dilemma of developing countries. No one dies from the floor shaking in an earthquake. People can die from the roof falling on their head in an earthquake. So the most vulnerable are impacted. But this is not a story of doom. This is not a victim’s story. Make it an action story. Development creates resilience in society,” Dr Najam pointed out.

On the topic of resilience, there was the session with Shahbaz Taseer about his memoir Lost to the World about his five years of captivity “with mad people, but who were also human.”

It was interesting listening to him tell moderator Framji Minwalla about one of his kidnappers coming to him to blow steam about his two wives. There was another, too, whose only link to the outside world was by following Manchester United games.

More about madness came in the panel discussion on ‘Storytelling, media and mental health’ with psychologist Dr Ayesha Mian, journalist and filmmaker Ziad Zafar, actor and producer/director Angeline Malik and actor and writer Meera Sethi that was moderated by academic Aliya Iqbal-Naqvi.

Though the session was a little all over the place, it was the filmmaker who helped the audience bring it all into perspective when he started speaking about his documentary As Far As They Can Run.

He mentioned one of his documentary subjects, the young girl Sana, who would be kept in chains by her family because she would otherwise run off, who then was brought into the Special Olympics programme. “The black sheep turned into a celebrity in her village when she ran at the games, and after that, too. She changed the narrative of mental health through sports,” he said.

The topic of mental health also reminds one of losing it, which is pretty much what happened at the session about the translation of policeman and author Omar Shahid Hamid’s first novel The Prisoner by Inaam Nadeem. The translator explained that the translation adds to the “lutf” or pleasure of reading the book in the Urdu language.

“It adds zuban ka chatkhara [flavour of tongue]” to the novel,“ he said before going on to read a portion from the book that left a bad taste in the mouth for many in the audience especially several ladies who just couldn’t sit there listening to the colourful expletives in Urdu that he kept on reading. They walked off of course but the translator was so absorbed in reading that he didn’t notice. All ‘adab’ here was simply thrown out of the window.

The evening and the festival wrapped up with a performance by the Grips Theatre ‘Art Ya Aata’, starring Khaled Anam Faiza Kazi, Khalifa Sajeeruddin, Ameed Riaz and Aysha Sheikh, which brought up giggles and chortles at wise cracks such as “No life after debt”, “Cheque De Pakistan due to IMF” and the country’s biggest issues summed up as “loan, drone and mobile phone, especially the mobile phone that’s in the hands of our youth.”

Published in Dawn, November 27th, 2023