[IMC Bombay] a report from Karachi on Arundhati Roy, Shekhar Gupta, N Ram and others

[Vickram Crishna]

A friend sent this from Karachi... thought it might be of interest to 
this group:


There were 2,000 people who turned out - all the intelligentsia, the 
Who's Who of Karachi, anyone who was anyone was there and each one of 
them greeting each other with those pretentious kisses and a "hello 
darling ... haven't seen you in zonks" type of language.

They were all there to see Arundhati Roy and to get her to autograph 
"The God of Small Things" which was of course available at a counter 
outside.

They had issued far more invitations than they should have because 
some people (the young ones) had to sit on the floor and on the 
stage. Some people actually stood throughout the proceedings.

Apart from Arundhati, there were two other visitors from India - 
Shekhar who is Editor in Chief of the Indian Express and Ram from The 
Hindu. The Pakistani speakers included Najam Sethi who is Publisher 
of The Friday Times and The Daily News (a new paper that has just 
been launched), a politician, an ex ambassador and foreign secretary 
and the publisher of the dawn group of newspapers.

The audience was very welcoming and enthusiastic, very responsive to 
the speakers and laughed mostly at the right junctures during the 
speeches.

What was mostly said was how the people's of the two countries 
actually got along very well together and wanted peace but that the 
governments were concentrating on Kashmir which they wouldn't solve 
anyway because they needed to pull it out of a hat each time they 
needed to distract their citizens from internal problems.

It was suggested that there should be more people-to-people contact, 
cultural exchanges, trade exchanges, family visits, just general the 
coming together of people so that we can better understand each other 
and begin to begin to focus on our similarities rather than our 
differences.

The road and bus service and flights should be renewed right away. 
All of the Indian visitors had to go on some convoluted route within 
India and then via Dubai to get here instead of just the hop, skip 
and jump from Delhi. Shekhar thought that since we were all extremely 
interested in conspiracy theories, his theory was that this was a 
conspiracy hatched by Emirates Airlines.

The consensus was that India was an imperfect democracy and Pakistan 
an imperfect dictatorship and that we should both try to leave it to 
each other to handle our extreme elements within our own countries, 
and concentrate on learning to work with each other on improving 
relations.

Although Ram and Shekhar were quite honest in their comments about 
both governments and their role in keeping the people's of the two 
countries apart, it was Arundhati who spared no-one in her sweet, 
unassuming tone. She said that any Indian who didn't support the 
nuclear bomb or the increase in armaments was made to feel that  he 
or she was anti-national, anti-patriotic. She said "I love India but 
when i was made to feel this I declared myself an independent citizen 
of the world."

She said that she and other people in India who were generally 
fighting other wars within the country - the war against poverty, 
against illiteracy, against unemployment, against so many injustices 
connected to religion, ethnicity, caste, social status, illness, etc 
etc etc resented it when their government declared war or fired a 
nuclear device because it took them away from these necessary 
struggles to now put up a fight for peace. She read out parts of that 
article she wrote on The Death of Imagination. People listened to it 
in silence and gave her a standing ovation when she finished. 
Everyone fell in love with her. I thought that there were 2000 people 
there, but I am told it was more like 3000.

-- 
Vickram