With the core social theme of ‘Power Of The Golden Years’, which is to empower senior citizens, the Pune International Literature Festival’s (PILF) 9th edition will be held from December 21 to 23. The festival will be held online for the second consecutive year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We get a footfall of 18,000 over three days so managing such a crowd will be difficult even with checking vaccine certificates and social distancing…Moreover with the travel restrictions, many speakers would not have been able to arrive,” said novelist and festival director Manjiri Prabhu.
Aligning with the edition’s theme, PILF will feature a key session, ‘Life Mantras – What Matters Most’ with Prabhu in conversation with Shobhaa De. Other sessions include Silver Talkies presenting ‘50 Shades of Empowerment’, ‘Dementia: Understanding and Prevention’, ‘Old? No-Vintage!’ a master class with Vardhaman Jain under the festival’s theme.
“We had it in the pipeline to have a theme like this and secondly, given the past two years, there is also a need to empower emotionally. We are opening the festival with a session ‘Happyness.me’ with Raj Nayak, founder and managing director of House Of Cheer. We are getting people to talk about the positives of life and the focus is to empower them emotionally,” added Prabhu.
The festival will debut a new segment called Wisdom Bytes – which are opinion pieces from experienced global voices to make understand ‘What the World Needs Today’. English primatologist and anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodall, Shashi Tharoor, Ana Aga, Anita Moorjani, Narayan Murthy and Ganesh Natarajan will be part of this pre-recorded segment.
The festival will feature 150 speakers over 70 sessions, which will take place in three online studios. Irish authors Cecelia Ahern and Sam Blake, Australian writer Carl A Harte, filmmaker and director Mira Nair, singer Remo Fernandes, author Ashwin Sanghi and Chef Anahita N Dhondy are some of the key faces of the festival.
“The three sessions will run parallel and patrons can watch them without any registration — the festival is free of cost. The audience can access the sessions on our official website, Facebook and YouTube pages. The session will be available online,” said Prabhu.
Segment ‘WhyBuyMyBook’, where one can to get to know the new authors on the block, and section ‘Featured Authors’, where established authors get to talk about their latest books, are also in the itinerary. Other festival events include Master Classes and sessions on a wide range of topics like ‘Putting a Face to India’s Farm Crisis’, ‘Reimagining the Maharajahs: Princely India and its Tales’ and ‘Brave Hearts of the Country’.
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