Jaipur Literature Festival London commemorates Ahmedabad plane crash victims

London, Jun 15 (PTI) The annual Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) London opened on a sombre note in solidarity with all those impacted by the Air India Ahmedabad-London plane crash, with senior Congress MP Shashi Tharoor leading a moment’s silence at the British Library.

A planned light-hearted inaugural session involving Indian High Commissioner to the UK Vikram Doraiswami was modified to a conversation around the ‘Power of Words’, with Tharoor and UK-based historian-author Shrabani Basu reflecting upon the inadequacy of words when coping with grief at such an enormous scale.

It came as the death toll in the tragic crash involving a plane that was due to land at London Gatwick Airport on Thursday evening hit 270, including 53 British nationals.

“The language of pain is not words but silence,” said Tharoor, as he shared with the audience how he had been airborne on another Air India flight to London at the time of the disaster.

“In many ways, the language of grief, of suffering, loss is a landscape of shadows. It's so often inadequate to the profound desolation that human beings feel and that language attempts, I think inadequately, to articulate,” he said.

Basu, the author of ‘Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan’ and ‘Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant’, added: “I hope today we can fill this room with the power of words, words to unite us, to console us, to remember those who lost their lives widely and also the love that they carried in their hearts, which we all share with them.” JLF London, one of the international off-shoots of the main literature festival held in Jaipur and running until Sunday, brought together speakers and writers from around the world to discuss everything from art to literature, history to science, food to film, international politics to sustainability.

“Creativity is and continues to be at the center of everything that we do,” said JLF producer Sanjoy Roy, managing director of Teamwork Arts.

“This weekend we will be celebrating books and ideas and music and so much more. And this, in many ways, again, is a bridge between India and the UK. Do we need bridges? You bet we do… The easiest thing to do is to hate. Much more difficult is to love and respect each other, and books and ideas are one way to be able to push back on that idea of ignorance,” he said.

This year’s programme included sessions with International Booker Prize-winning Kannada author of ‘Heart Lamp’ Banu Mushtaq, lyricist and poet Javed Akhtar, novelist Shobhaa De, playwrights Hanif Kureishi and David Hare, JLF co-directors William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, among others.

“Our London edition is a vibrant affirmation of multilingual, multicultural literary exchange,” said Gokhale. PTI AK GSP GSP