Come winter and the air in India is agog with literary festivals in many places of the country. Big ones and smaller ones where even part-time scribblers like us can creep in for a take on the mood of literature.
Which obviously stands in contrast to a chain of happenings those are light years away from the ethos and feathery touch of literature. An art which speaks of society, nature, musical flow, linguistic zeal and love.
It is all about a structure that arouses the conscious of people by its descriptive fairness and a truth blend with fictions.
But what happens today outside the enclosures of a lit fest! The society getting close to being splintered by hatred, a climate that nears its collapse and a child, up the wall looking ahead to a future.
People taking to the streets in protest against something, political outfits fuel rebellions on things those have nothing to do with people or say, literature or the society.
It is difficult to accept that when there is fire outside and one sits down writing an article on the nuances of literature or the artistic endeavours long forgotten. At a time when many have stopped being normal or decent.
Literature, of course, has a role at creating an air of ecstatic sermons to drift across the nation that today it has festering sores of communal divides and revenges, that today, resonate the loudest.
Literature holds power to change
Literature has the power to freeze the moments away from the acts of unrest to a solitary self from where one can try to have glimpses of manhood and normalcy.
One needs to discover why the society is today in the hands of some people who espouse irresponsibility and vice.
It is difficult to believe that many people from the world of literature get waylaid by the powerful to make interjections on the political turmoil than speaking something on writings, essays, aesthetic enthusiasm and tell all about a society that people should strive for.
So, lit fests cannot alone be the events for speeches but it must go beyond to initiate the common people to the designs of politics which slowly gets centralized with power and gives a damn to a socialistic thought process to grow.
