KARACHI, Nov 20: A smile-eliciting discussion between Indian graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee and Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif on works of the former entertained a jam-packed audience at T2F on Tuesday evening.

Hanif started off the programme by introducing Banerjee to the attendees. He said the writer had three novels to his credit, namely Corridor, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers and The Harappa Files. Apart from that he’s a filmmaker and a celebrated artist and had also had a project titled The Gallery of Losers at the Olympics.

The first question Hanif hurled at the novelist was about how he viewed Karachi. Banerjee replied that he’d been coming to the city for a while. The first time he came here he was embedded with a peace mission (and jokingly remarked he had an ulterior motive that nobody could know about – he’s married to a Pakistani woman). He said he liked Karachi’s architecture, its winter, its life and its colour. He claimed many important things had happened to him in the city and remarked that a city was what you invested it with or what you made of it.

Then a short animated film titled 1943 made by Banerjee was shown. The film recalls a difficult time in Bengal, his views on certain individuals and on the issue of educated youngster accepting jobs rather hesitatingly. It also touches on the character of a telephone sanitizer.

Banerjee told the audience that the film was an attempt to look at a personal universe in a larger context. He said Calcutta, like Karachi, was a class-based society and both cities mirrored each other. He talked about his childhood with respect to the idea of travel when he’d go to the airport to receive a visitor and feel that beyond the tarmac there was the plane, and beyond that there was life. Hanif asked him with reference to the film, 1943, whether its story led him to its ending or surprised him, to which Banerjee replied that it surprised him to know how you could mythologize yourself. The novelist reverted to his impressions of Karachi and commented you entered a city through its people.

Hanif then brought up Banerjee’s project The Gallery of Losers and asked him to tell the audience about its genesis. Banerjee said he came up with the concept in Brazil where he had run into a 1984 Olympic silver medalist, Douglas Vierra, who defeated his Japanese opponent in judo but lost the battle for gold against a Korean. Vierra showed Banerjee his certificates and other papers leading the novelist to develop empathy for the Olympian. During one of his meetings with Vierra, the judo player threw Banerjee on the mat a number of times. This made him think of up of an idea for those who came very close to achieving their goal and were not serious losers. Banerjee, with the help of slides of the project which was on display on billboards in London, talked the audience through some of the characters in the gallery of losers.

After that another short animated film titled Sophistication is Fragile was screened. The film touches on the issue of how the quest for expansion (of empires) can affect the pursuit of knowledge.

Hanif read out an excerpt from The Harappa Files and queried Banerjee about the statements that he made in his novels. The novelist said he disapproved of the moral outrage of urban Indians that he often came across (for example at the passport office). To flesh out his point and to highlight the topic of unbridled consumerism, he discussed another of his characters, a Jaguar salesman.