Language connections at Samanvay 2013

The third edition of the IHC Indian Languages Festival, Samanvay, was successfully held from October 24 – 27, 2013. This year, the festival’s theme was Jodti Zubanein, Judti Zubanein: Language Connections. Samanvay brought together 20 languages and dialects. The festival was well attended and the collaborating partner was NBT, India. The four-day festival also conducted interactive sessions where stalwarts like Jerry Pinto, Ketan Mehta, Gulzar, Mahesh Bhatt and Piyush Mishra, among others, took part.

Since its inception, the India Habitat Centre (IHC) has endeavored to create platforms for public discourse across different genres of the pursuit of excellence by Indian minds. ‘Samanvay’ is a platform for bringing together expressions of human thoughts in the varied and diverse cultural contexts that have been nurtured and have flourished in many languages spoken in our cultural milieu. These conversations amongst brilliant and well-known writers seek to bring to the sparkle of multilingual expressions and their inspirations.

At Samanvay, Hind Pocket Books unveiled series of Hindi and other language books. Shekhar Malhotra, director, Hind Pocket Book and Full Circle, said, “The potential and future of language book publishing is bright, and all that it requires is a cohesive and hardcore marketing game plan by professional and seasoned publishers. The recent phenomenal success of English book The Fakir authored by Ruzbeh N Bharucha, and its Punjabi and Bengali versions touching new sales records is a case in point. These language editions had wide publicity and professional marketing touch of Hind Pocket Book distribution.”