[Reader-list] PEN All-India Centre: 13 March: 'Public Silences' discussion

[Ranjit Hoskote]

THE P.E.N. ALL-INDIA CENTRE

invites you, with your friends, to

PUBLIC SILENCES

a discussion platform featuring

KUMAR KETKAR, AZAR MAHLOUJIAN & KALPANA SHARMA


Date:   Monday, 13 March 2006
Time:   6.15 p.m.
Venue:  Theosophy Hall (3rd floor)
        40 New Marine Lines, Churchgate, Mumbai 400 020

Recent events in India and overseas have exposed the vulnerability of the public sphere to illiberal forces. Forces opposed to the free expression of thought and creativity; but also forces that use freedom of expression as a pretext to provoke misunderstanding and hatred. In India, this situation is worsened by the lethal combination of a State given to knee-jerk censorship; a sensationalist media; an ill-informed public; and incendiary demagogic groups. Rabble-rousing displaces debate. Dissent retreats before violence. Official censorship is matched by a cautious self-censorship. This crisis profoundly concerns writers, artists, journalists, scholars and readers.

ALL ARE WELCOME: THIS MEETING IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC


KUMAR KETKAR is Chief Editor of Loksatta. He was formerly Editor of the Maharashtra Times and a senior political commentator for The Times of India. During his three-decade-long career as a journalist and writer, he has commented in depth on national as well as international issues, reporting from Moscow on the Soviet Union’s collapse, and from Beijing on China’s transformation. Ketkar has been visiting lecturer at prestigious universities in India and the USA.

AZAR MAHLOUJIAN is a writer and librarian of Iranian origin, now resident in Sweden. She writes in Swedish, and is the author of Torn Pictures, an account of her flight from Iran and her life in exile in Sweden. Mahloujian’s transcultural position gives her a vantage point from which to comment on the control and repression mechanisms in Pahlavi and post-Revolution Iran, as well as on the vexed representations of the ‘East’, Islam and cultural ‘Others’ in Europe.

KALPANA SHARMA is Chief of the Mumbai Bureau of The Hindu, and Deputy Editor. She has worked in various media environments including Himmat, The Indian Express and The Times of India, in the course of over three decades. Her practice straddles reportage, features and editorial comment; she writes on women’s issues, urban crises, and human rights violations. She is the author of Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum (Penguin, 2000).

Ranjit Hoskote
Hon. Secretary-Treasurer
The P.E.N. All-India Centre


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