New Delhi, 18 March, 2015: Oxford Bookstore and Namita Gokhale hosted a session on ‘The Absent Chair: Keeping the world safe for poetry’ in reading and conversation about the worlds and freedom with Ashok Vajpeyi, Aruni Kashyap, Akhil Katyal and Nilanjana Roy.
The inspiration behind the session come from the PEN tradition of placing an empty chair on a dais, to represent a person or people who can’t speak because they are in J*il. There were readings of poems from all languages with translations into either English or Hindi.
These were around the issues: writers in J*il, writers under threat (in India and elsewhere); the necessity of claiming at least personal, intellectual, and emotional freedom and how one does this when you may not have legal, political or social freedoms; poetry as the freest form of writing.
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