Discussions and concepts on Day 2
Here’s a peek into what happened on the second day of the HLF
CITY AND ITS IDENTITY
What is a city and what does it mean to people who have lived there for years and for those just visiting? And how does one begin to document the lives of people who have been relegated to a city’s fringes for years — and their history not even mentioned in prominent monuments. These and several other deep concepts were discussed during various sessions on Sunday at the Hyderabad Literature Festival. Authors Robyn Andrews and Tulsi Badrinath, who wrote the books Calcutta: Anglo-Indian Stories and Essays and Madras, Chennai and the Self respectively spoke about their experiences of telling life stories from the two cities.
“We live only one life and narrating stories from the lives of people helps us visualise and relate to what another person might be going through in a different city, perhaps in a different country where we have never been,” says Tulsi, also an accomplished Bharatanatyam dancer.
Robyn, who is a social anthropologist based in New Zealand, adds, “One should also have a sharp vision to avoid any stereotypes while representing a community and a city.”
SEXUAL REVOLUTION IN THE COUNTRY
At the session Kama and Contemporary India, by authors Ira Trivedi and Anuja Chandramouli, Ira said, “The sexual revolution has begun, although at the surface, but nobody can stop it.” But she also mentions an underlying tension which perhaps still exists. “I am almost 30, but even today when I get a call on our landline and if it’s a man on the other end, my father instantaneously says that I am not at home,” she says.
For her book India in Love:
Marriage and Sexuality in the 21st Century, Ira mentions that she spent a lot of time at marriage bureaus and found out that even when youngsters go for arranged marriages the trend is to insist on chemistry and physical compatibility more than looks or money. To this Anuja added, “Having being married for almost 10 years I can add that marriage is a little more than just ‘chemistry’.” Parents in the audience spoke about the need to develop a better connect with their teenage children than what they had with their parents in their teens.
IMPORTANCE OF PRESERVING LANGUAGES
At the keynote session on Sunday, eminent linguist G.N. Devy spoke about the importance of preserving our languages. He said that we have learnt to use and understand languages as we know it only 30,000 years back, and today around 2,000 of them are nearing extinction. “In India, we have around 1,100 languages but only 22 of them are represented in the 8th schedule, which means that just 2 per cent of it is recognised and can be used as a languages of transaction, ” he says. He added that with depleting languages we are moving towards a form of communication which will be image based.