Festivals and conferences |
THE start of 2026 was a busy time. I was invited to participate in five conferences on education and I attended two ‘festivals’: the Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) and the Faiz Festival in Lahore. A lot of people have written their views on these and other gatherings and many of their observations about the need to ensure broader participation and representation as well as deeper engagement are well taken. However, here I will reflect largely on what this participation allowed me, a teacher and researcher in economics and education, to gain.
There were a lot of experts from different areas that I was able to meet during and around the discussion sessions. Conversations with them allowed me to learn a lot about areas that I do not directly work in. Artificial intelligence was a hot topic in almost all the conferences and festivals I attended. And rightly so. AI is expected to cause significant changes in almost all sectors of interest; we need to understand its potential as well as the disruption it is going to cause, and figure out ways to cope with the disruption as effectively as possible.
What changes will AI bring to the education sector — in curricula, pedagogy, assessments and in how we teach and learn? What impact will this have on teachers, schools and universities? How do we prepare for it and how do we prepare our students for the world of tomorrow? These are not trivial questions. I listened to and engaged with experts on public health, education, industry, computer science, physics, philosophy, literature and mental health to deepen my understanding of pertinent issues. I could, of course, read about all this. But conversations proved to be a crash course and provided me with nuance that reading on its own might not have been able to do.
Each festival had some 40 to 50 sessions and 200-plus panellists or speakers. I am sure not every point of view was represented and not every issue received the attention it deserved. Yet, it afforded me plenty of variety in terms of points of views that I wanted to engage with. And many of the sessions I attended had lively audience participation through comments and questions.
Each festival had some 40 to 50 sessions and 200-plus panellists or speakers.
On the sidelines, over coffee, breakfast, lunch and dinner, I was able to have deeper conversations with some colleagues and even new acquaintances. It allowed me to think of a number of new projects and writing engagements. Especially memorable was a conversation I had with a colleague who explained how AI had begun to shape his industry and work at his factory and company. Another noteworthy conversation was with a writer of fiction on his process of writing and thinking. The most noteworthy conversation was with someone who was setting up and expanding institutions for tertiary education across Pakistan and had big plans for the future.
I met a significant number of younger people who came up to me to talk about education issues. A young man told me that my articles in this paper had helped him prepare for the CSS examination. Though pleased, I told him that I hoped he had not just relied on newspaper op-eds for all his knowledge. Two other conversations are also worth recalling. One was with a student who was trying to improve his writing skills in English.
We had a long exchange about what sort of reading and writing could help him develop his own style of writing and gain facility with the language. Second, there was a conversation with a student trying to decide what career path to follow after completing his Bachelor’s degree. He was trying to choose between his love for literature and the need to do something that had value in the ‘market’.
I did feel that the conversations were a bit more engaged and livelier in Karachi than in Lahore. Is it because Karachi has a bigger middle class? It also seemed that Karachi had more space for political discussion and expression. The questions, comments and discussion on political issues in Pakistan — democracy, governance and the role of the establishment — were more open and livelier in Karachi than I have seen, at least recently, in Lahore. In one of the sessions a young man stood up and asked a question. He was wearing a ‘Free Imran Khan’ T-shirt. This was not an issue in Karachi. Do we have the same space in Lahore?
There were a lot of sessions for children at the festivals as well. My daughter attended sessions on stage acting, storytelling, writing, kathak and on an introduction to AI and other digital tools. It would have been almost impossible to attend all of them over a couple of days if the experts were not together at one venue.
The festivals allowed me to buy a lot of books. Having many publishers and booksellers at the same place, with time to browse at leisure, is a luxury that is seldom available. Yes, we can browse online and we can visit individual booksellers, but the joy of seeing so many books, real ones and not the digital versions, that you can touch, smell and read a little before making choices about buying, if these gatherings did nothing else for me, this would be contribution enough.
Not everyone got the chance to speak, not every issue and every group got representation. That would be true of any gathering, whatever its size or orientation. Maybe, the solution lies in creating more avenues and fora for discussion and debates. There are too many issues that we, as a people, need to discuss, there are so many things that we can learn from each other in discussion and debate. Conferences and festivals are great places for doing this. Given the lack of conversations in our society and lack of fora for conversations, we should have more of them and more groups should feel empowered enough to start festivals and fora of their own.
The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums.
Published in Dawn, February 27th, 2026