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I had attended the World Punjabi Conference in Lahore as the year began and it seemed natural to catch up when many of the Pakistani delegates were in Chandigarh for the next WPC as summer peaked. Funny how such back-to-back conferences happen when bonhomie floods hearts and governments tweak their political agenda. Anyway, this one was organized at Shivalik View Hotel (which of course allows a very poor view of the Shivaliks). The following piece appeared in The Indian Express as the conclave took off.

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	"Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment." Charles Lamb, 1833 "Frankly, despite my horror of the press, I’d love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers." Luis Buñuel, Spanish filmmaker "I often wonder what future historians will say about us. One sentence will suffice to describe modern man: he fornicated and he read newspapers." Albert Camus, French novelist, dramatist, philosopher, 1956

In Shahmukhi, In Gurmukhi,
the message from WPC is same
– We Love You

S P Singh

Chandigarh

The tenth World Punjabi Congress, which took off today, is perhaps all about spilling out emotions, as the Shahmukhi and Gurmukhi writers met each other like 16-year-olds and said to each other what 16-year-olds often say in three beautiful words – “We love you.”

Novelists and writers talked like men of letters, Imran Akram of Dawn hobnobbed with local scribes, Saleem Pasha went around distributing his monthly Rozan International journal, Satinder Noor spewed wisdom, Deepak Manmohan Singh cracked jokes, and Avtar Paul worried about the arrangements no end.

But the WPC was about what Afzal Ahsan Randhawa was going through. The man who seemed most disinterested in the goings-on inside the hall at the Shivalik View Hotel, represented the success of WPC. Amritsar-born Randhawa, easily the tallest name in Pakistani Punjab’s literary domain, wrote his first Punjabi novel Deeva te Dariya in 1960. Many of his books are prescribed for the students of Punjabi literature in India. But the 1937-born was visiting Punjab for the first time since Partition.

"There is too much emotional upheaval that I am going through. Who wants to talk literature? I saw Amritsar for the first time; you know I actually passed through Jalandhar. And then someone said in the bus that we were in Ludhiana," silver-haired Randhawa was speaking like a child mesmerized. Overtaken by emotion because your bus was passing through Ludhiana?

Many like him were trying to drink it in – the atmosphere, the flavour of a Punjabi which sounds somewhat different, the eagerness with which they wanted to know everything. Those who walk the Gulberg area were trying to compare the Sector 17 piazza with it.

Renowned economist Sucha Singh Gill was telling people about economic opportunities that improved Indo-Pak ties can offer. Many were nodding in agreement. Zareen of Panna Art Group from Pakistan was saying people of the two Punjabs love each other. Everyone was in agreement.

Higher Education Minister Harnam Das Johar called WPC Chairman Fakhar Zaman the badshah of Punjabi unity. Zaman felt an inch taller. Johar was soon saying Deepak Manmohan was the pride of Punjab. Deepak smiled like a bridegroom inches away from the altar. Deepak always smiles that way. He is always that distance away from the altar. Ask anyone who knows him.

K.L. Zakir looked contented. Years ago, he scripted Karmawaali, the play about a woman torn by Partition. Today he watched people trying to overcome that divide. As his daughter Kamlesh Mohan, head of History Department at Panjab University, was leading her father out of the hall, he seemed happy that times were changing.

Barbed wire still runs along the border, but love came flooding in from the gates at Wagah. At Shivalik View the levels shot up the danger-mark where it can become permanent. For the next two days, be there, get drenched.■

May 28, 2004

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An advanced student of literature unearthed from Spicy Western Stories a gem that read: “She was silent for a long time. He could smell the perfume as it wafted upward from between her proud breasts, placed so cleverly on the lobes of her ears,” The New Yorker snapped it up, of course, and added the perfect comment: “Novel, but we wouldn’t like it as a steady thing.”

Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, once tried to stop private telephone calls in his office and went so far as to install a public coin booth in the reception room. The next morning he found the booth torn loose from its roots, on its back in his own private office. Stretched out inside it, a calla lily clutched in his hand and a wreath on his head, lay James Thurber. When Ross once complained, “Thurber’s women don’t have any sex appeal,” Marc Connelly reminded him, “They do for Thurber’s men.” Thurbers’s definition of humour will do until a better one comes along: “Humour is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.”

Triumph of tact: Miss Marlene Dietrich had her picture taken and fumed at the result. “I can’t understand it,” she said. “The last time I posed for you, the photographs were heavenly.” “Ah, yes,” sighed the camera man, “but you must remember that I was eight years younger then.”

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