Inaugurating the second edition of the Odisha Literary Festival, organised by The New Indian Express, Union Minster Shashi Tharoor said ignorance and prejudice remain the handmaidens of violence.
“It is true of terrorism as it is of modern civil conflicts that men of war prey on the ignorance of the populace to instill fear and arouse hatred,” Tharoor said, adding in Bosnia and Rwanda, murderous, even genocidal ideologies took root in the absence of truthful information and honest education.
“If only half the effort had gone into teaching those people what unites them, and not what divides them, unspeakable crimes could have been prevented,” he said. Literature can bring down violence in today’s world as reading and writing broadens minds, he added. Stating that two contradictory forces shape the world of letters today, Tharoor said the first is globalisation of human imagination and the second is anxiety of audience.
The world of trade and commerce are new to the process of globalisation and human imagination got there first. The terrorist attacks like 9/11 in New York and 26/11 in Mumbai are forces of disruption which threaten to create divisions between the haves and have nots, between North and South, Tharoor said, adding, these two phenomena are clearly pulling us together as well as they drive us apart.
The Union Minister said the fundamental conflict of our times is not the clash between two civilisations, but doctrines-religious and ethnic fundamentalism on the one hand, secular consumerist capitalism on the other.
Delivering his address on the occasion, Editorial Director of The New Indian Express Prabhu Chawla said the basic focus of this festival remains unchanged: it is to refocus attention on Indian literature.
Unlike other literary festivals which promote largely Indian writing in English or works of fiction and non-fiction by foreigners, Chawla said, this event focuses as much on regional, particularly Odia literature, poetry and culture, as also English and other Indian languages.