The literature festival is the most contingent of fair forms. Each one is punctured by compromises. These are often familiar to the point of predictability: faulty lighting, a shoestring budget, the impossible-to-find-a-space-in venue, and an inept PR team. Festivals can never be totalising visions or final versions, even when they pretend to be, because there is just so much that cannot be controlled, especially temper tantrums, misdemeanour and insolence.

On rare occasions, though, real life can intervene in more significant ways. It could be argued that literary festivals should be disbanded and reconstructed from scratch to ensure that their dynamism and fresh thinking continues, rather than allowing them to become overly institutionalised corporate entities with regular visitors and big-name writers pushed forward by sponsor-conscious PR machinery.

There is undoubtedly something special about attending a festival like Karachi Literature Festival organised by the Oxford University Press at Beach Luxury Hotel, particularly in a country like Pakistan, which is on the eve of what could amount to being the first transition from a rogue nation-state to a potential repository of intellect and cultural exchange. KLF attracts new, curious, often non-literary personalities: businessmen, diplomats, politicians and partygoers. By the afternoon of the last day, queues of thousands wait to see and hear Zia Mohyeddin, Bushra Ansari and Mustansar Hussain Tarar.

As keynote speaker, Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece and Vijayalakshmi Pandit’s daughter, Nayantara Sahgal -- a novelist and columnist of repute herself -- expressed the need for writers and readers to develop a comradeship in the troubled times. Referring to Douglas Reed’s Insanity Fair, she pointed out how the title is valid still today as literature is endangered. "The climate in which creative people live is directly at par with insanity," she added. "Politics has intimately and painstakingly crept into private lives, and writers have always taken sides. I was surrounded by a political milieu since my birth, the reason why the tone of all my novels is political," she confessed in another session devoted to her biography, Out of Line: A Literary and Political Biography by Ritu Menon, founder of the Kali Press for Women.

Representatives of ‘I Am Karachi’ consortium, echoing the sentiments of nearly every resident of the megalopolis, further flanked the opening day. "There are times when you mourn the city, and times when you celebrate it," quipped Ghazi Salahuddin. Friday evening also marked the announcement of KLF Best Fiction Book Prize 2015 that went to Shandana Minhas for ‘Survival Tips to Lunatics’ while KLF Coca Cola Best Non-fiction Book Prize was grabbed by M Naeem Qureishi for ‘Ottoman Turkey, Ataturk and Muslim South Asia: Perspectives, Perceptions and Resources’. Zehra Nigah, the other keynote speaker enlivened the evening with her piquant anecdotes: "There was once a time when couples used to gift books to each other as a token of love. If they wanted to make it special, they would underline and mark the exact sentences to make a deeper impression. This was before the mobile phones had taken over."

The rather eloquent session, ‘The World As The Author Sees It’ attended by Mohammed Hanif, Alex Preston, Benyamin and Aakar Patel delivered a rousing message on equality, contextualisation, colonialism, and the need for governments that empower people to talk back to officialdom. Aakar Patel further rationalised Saadat Hassan Manto’s role as an essayist while reading out excerpts from his translation, Why I Write: Essays by Manto. He recognised the danger of using Manto as a linchpin to understand Partition, and maintained that the simple and readable nature of his work offers a starting point to explore this facet of subcontinent’s history. He also said that Manto’s work helped Indian readers understand the history of violence in the country through his objective view of the interplay between religion, secularism, and violence.

Talking about violence, Mohammed Hanif, veteran author and firebrand thinker, addressed Balochistan while referring to the long march led by the Voice of Baloch Missing People’s leader Mama Qadeer in the session entitled, ‘The Satirical Pen’. Politics ruled the roost with Najam Sethi, Jugnu Mohsin, Aitzaz Ahsan, and Asma Jahangir contemplating the changing face of Pakistani politics while Syeda Abida Husain and Anna Suvorova launched Power Failure: The Political Odyssey of a Pakistani Woman and Benazir Bhutto: A Multidimensional Portrait, respectively.

From biographies to anthologies and compilations of poems, KLF 2015 was an inexhaustible pageant of commotion and pursuit, ranging between Kishwar Naheed, Fehmida Riaz, Zahida Khatoon Sherwaniya and Nayyar Masud. If Habib Jalib was remembered as a Shayer-e-Awam, N M Rashid was unravelled in ‘I Too Have Some Dreams’ by Sean Pue in a crammed session with the author/translator from the US and Sarah Humayun.

Karachi, the city, loomed large in discussions on what made the city resilient. Pervez Hoodbhoy reminisced how diverse the city used to be when he was young. "People had very different kinds of neighbours. Our immediate neighbours were Christians. A little further down was a Parsi family and then a couple of Hindu ones. Then they all left." He added that this had nothing to do with the population increase but with the change in attitudes. "If there is a small number of fish in an aquarium, they will swim past each other. But if this number keeps increasing the fish will get aggressive. They won’t be fighting for food but for space."

A similar point of view was rephrased by Arif Hasan in the session titled, ‘Vitality and Violence: The Chaos That Is Karachi’ where he proclaimed that Karachi has become an extremely ugly city in the last 25 years, and it is becoming progressively worse. Karachi’s very major issue is land.

KLF 2015 also occasioned tributes to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in the session ‘He Sang To Our Souls" with his biographer Pierre Alain Baud, to The Life and Work of Rashid Jahan by Rakhshanda Jalil, and to Musaddiq Sanwal with the posthumous launch of his poetry titled, Kitab-e-Muntashir: Yeh Natamam Si Eik Zindagi Jo Guzri Hai. Mohammed Hanif recalled the days when he and Sanwal, wooed by city life, came to Karachi together. He recollected their early days and how they were known among their circle as a ‘notorious couple’. "Sanwal used to cram visitors in his one-room apartment. It was exactly the way we have gathered here today." Hasan Zaidi reminisced the day Sanwal got to know about his ailment. He became even stronger and began to pen down his untold story.

‘Good literature transcends boundaries’, concluded the panel chairing ‘The English Language Literatures of South Asia: Do They Interact With Each Other?’ Ritu Menon was of the view that the ruptures created in the literary and cultural domains are because of restrictions on trade and exchange. She attributed the problem to the fact that books written by South Asian writers are taken to the West for publishing. This restricts the writer from having a market in the neighbouring countries. "We cannot trade printed material between Pakistan and India as it is not allowed. Under such rules if one has to read a novel by someone from across the border, piracy is the only choice left to him."

In Bangladesh, however, English literature is a comparatively new domain. A renowned poet of the country, Sadaf Saaz Siddiqui, said that after 1971, people in Bangladesh had to fight for their own language, Bangla. "This is why the country is quite behind in the field of English literature", she added.

KLF 2015 probably meant different things to different groups of people, and it takes all sorts to make the world, as they say. To some, the best thing about the festival was the Food Court where confusion and chaos, shortage and measly portions of food could be bartered for chunks of throwaway money while for others who came bedecked in Sunday Best, it was a socialite picnic by the creek where the movers and shakers had come together to lance open the future of literature in Pakistan.

In the absence of timelines in risk-taking, mega-events like the Literature Festival become mere matters of professional hubris and career strategy, making the balance of art history overly subject to the personal goals of one curator, or two, as in case of KLF 2015. Consider the way in which KLF this year has resulted in near-total polarisation within the literary world, as each session seemed to have been curated with a confrontational approach rather than an experimental one, leaving out literatures and their sub-genres in the regional languages, save Amar Jaleel’s Atam Katha.

Whereas the director, Ameena Saiyid, could be said to have pushed the envelope, or even to have tossed it away, Asif Farrukhi apparently simply scribbled on the envelope and mailed it to the usual addresses -- Mohammed Hanif, Kamila Shamsie, Muneeza Shamsie, H. M. Naqvi, and Fehmida Riaz. If you read any manual on how to become a good manager in the business world, you will learn that the golden rule is to talk only 10 percent of the time and listen the other 90 per cent. Clearly, neither Saiyid nor Farrukhi believes this rule applies in literature. While Saiyid likely did 90 per cent of the talking, Farrukhi clearly listened only to his own thoughts, transforming them into claustrophobic sessions.

Of course, any curator seeking to curate the KLF is like a person wanting to own a pet tiger. Eventually, and no matter what you do, you will get mauled. Even so, it’s never safe to believe too much in one’s own act when approaching the task. You must follow your vision but then stop before it turns into a tragic delusion -- never mistaking the platform for a pulpit or a place for personal vendettas, curatorial tantrums, or outbursts of repressed frustration.

Shows like the literature festivals, in other words, are specific spaces with specific contexts. They are hubs of conviviality, grounds for discussion, and opportunities for validation. They exist outside the institution’s context, meaning that curatorial practice here must bear in mind both the limited duration of an idea as well as the significance and reality of others’ experience. The festival here never arrives at a final result; it cannot be the culmination of a process or even a stepping-stone to building a legacy. What is significant, on the other hand, is the ability to underscore and understand differences.