Remembering Khushwant Singh at LitFest 2021 with 100 lamps

Fakir Syed Aijazuddin The Decennial Khushwant Singh LitFest 2021 celebrated its first ten years reincarnating a virtual persona of India’s most famous writer. Normally, it would have been held in Khushwant’s summer eyrie at Kasauli (H.P.), had COVID-19 not prevailed.
Unchanged, though, was the array of talent and experience KSLF attracts from across the planet. Each speaker reminds the audience of the concerns that absorbed, agitated and excited Khushwant Singh during his 99-year lifetime.
Vikram Seth, whom Khushwant regarded as his ‘second son’, lit a pyramid of a hundred diyas – one more than Khushwant’s years – and then recited the acrostic sonnet he wrote for him, an echo of Shakespeare’s sonnet 55: ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments/Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme’.
Khushwant Singh’s granddaughter Naina Dayal had the genetic right to open the first formal session. She spoke of him with an intimacy that only a family member can, for his private persona was not always as unblemished as the public one he fabricated for an adoring public.
Bachi Karkaria recalled the years of Khushwant Singh’s editorship of the Illustrated Weekly of India, which he resurrected and for nine years (1969-78) nursed back to life, only to have its owners remove him and then bury it alive.  The third speaker Pavan Varma, like Khushwant, had abjured diplomacy and, as had many budding authors (with Khushwant’s help), sky-dove into India’s literary landscape.
The green author Jocelyn Zuckerman ended the first day with a discussion on her book Planet Palm. How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything―and Endangered the World – a stark indictment of corporate greed, corruption by states as much as individuals, and crimes against humanity – e.g. the profitable, unconscionable slave trade that for centuries fattened the economies of the U.S., the U.K., France and Belgium.