JNU Teachers’ fest concludes

New Delhi: The Jawaharlal Nehru University Teachers Association’s (JNUTA) four-day festival, held to thwart the “wilful attempts to misrepresent the varsity,” concluded on Sunday with discussions on politics, journalism, and films by filmmaker Aparna Sen and journalist Ravish Kumar.

The aim of the four-day festival, ‘MOSAIC: Judte-Judte (unite) JNU!’ was to counter the ‘Tukde-Tukde’ narrative, which has been used to vilify a section of students, artists, and activists.

After the screening of Aparna Sen’s film ‘Ghare Baire Aaj’ a remake of Satyajit Ray’s ‘Ghare Baire’ of 1984 at the JNU convention centre, Sen spoke about the modern adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s novel (The Home and the World) and how it was depicted through the characters in the movie.

“I made the character - Sandip (an anti-hero) very complex. He was an atheist, he joined the maoist movement. He was very active in party politics when he was in college but later on turned into a whole different person. He still remains in politics but he is no longer a leftist. I showed how he moved to the other extreme,” Sen said, discussing the characters in the movie. Published in 1916, ‘Ghare Baire’ was written in the backdrop of the partition of Bengal in 1905 and its counter — the Swadeshi movement.

The festival that began on Thursday, had a campus walk, theatre performances, open mic, academic discussion, and a food festival.

Speaking at the event during a discussion on politics and journalism, journalist Ravish Kumar said that media houses are only “media in name” and that they do not have any quality that media organisations should possess.

“There are several media organisations these days, but they are only media in name. They don’t have a single quality that a media organisation should possess. Information is corrupted by them,” he said.

The journalist also called religion the bane of a healthy political discourse, as against secularism which sees all citizens of “all caste, creed and religion equally.”