LAHORE: The eighth edition of Afkar-e-Taza ThinkFest opened here on Saturday with a session with renowned film-maker Mira Nair and novelist Mohsin Hamid who spoke about their collaboration for making The Reluctant Fundamentalist, based on Hamid`s novel in the post-9/11 world.

In the session moderated by Bilal Tanweer, Nair traced her connection with Lahore. `My Abbu came from Lahore. My mother was from Amritsar. I grew up in Orissa, in the east of India where he was a civilservant but we grew up with the poems of Faiz and Iqbal. He only spoke Urdu and Persian and my mother spoke Punjabi and Hindi. I lived in those words, lyrics and dreams of here (Lahore). It was always a desire to come here but was almost impossible until 2005/6 when Ali Sethi, Jugnu and Najam Sethi invited Mahmood (her husband) and I to speak about Monsoon Wedding and my films.

She said she felt she had come into the embrace of a bosomi Punjabi Auntie JI and it was amazing. She said she felt that I had come to a place that was her own and she was deeply inspired by music, people and art and how deeply different was the actual experience of being in Pakistan compared to what the newspapers said.

`I wanted to tell this tale of not just my experience but this absolute schism between what one part of the world thinks about the otherand like Mohsin I also knew the West. I have lived there since I was 18, I know there was just a monologue. I did not know what to do about it until Ali Sethi came with an unpublished manuscript of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. When I read it, I just said `this is it` as I understood Changez and being in love with America and, as Changez says, and being betrayed by it.

After reading the manuscript, Mira quickly got the rights to make the film of the novel.

`This book is a very difficult book to make into a film because it`s a monologue and monologues don`t make films. Once we had the rights, very quickly we invited Mohsin to work with us on the screenplay. The process of adaptation took three years.` She said for creating the character of Bobby (the American), she leant on Mohsin to ensure that she and her team did not invent something utterly separate from thefabric of the book.

`We created Bobby together and we needed that thriller to keep the audience in any part of the world hooked to the story.

Mira Nair said the people were terrified by the title and were asking her to change it but she just laughed as it was the title that grabbed her in the first place, sensing a mystery in it. `It was an international movie that had to be made in Pakistan, India, Turkey and America and it needed money. We got two investors but one of them disappeared two weeks before the start of filming.

Mira had to request the other investor to make the film with half the budget. I got help from an Indian friend director who turned out to be an editor and offered to edit the film that saved her a couple of millions of dollars.

She said all scenes of Pakistan, Turkey, and Malaysia were filmedin India except two days of outdoor shooting in Lahore because there was no insurance to bring actors in.

Two days of exterior shooting wasdone in Turkey. She said her next movie would be on Amrita Shergil who lived and died in Lahore.

Mohsin Hamid said after publishing his debut novel Moth Smoke he wanted to write a very different book. `Moth Smoke was a novel about Lahore written by someone who had spent half of their life outside Pakistan so it was not an insider`s account of a particular slice of Lahori life. The Reluctant Fundamentalist was the opposite of Moth Smoke.

It was an account of life in the US by someone who lived half of his life outside the US.

He said the novel began the year before 2001. `As we all know Sept 11, 2001, there was a massive terrorist attack which set the motion inthe invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and so much else that followed.

Before that happened, he said, he was working on a novel about a guy who had a corporate job in New York, feeling that he was in service of the financial empire that he did not to serve, quits his job and moved back to Lahore. Mohsin narrated the incident how his agent had rejected it, terming it very quiet. `A couple of months later, 9/11 happened and the agent asked about the book about the Muslim guy who wanted to go back.

Mohsin said he never wanted to write a novel about 9/11 and a quiet love story of break-up.

`For a year, I was stuck and then I tried to revisethe novel but I kept setting it before 9/11 so that it would not be about 9/11. Years later, it occurred to me that I need to take the 9/11 reality but I also wanted the novel to be simultaneously set in Pakistan and America so this notion of a frame of a Pakistani meets an American man meeting in the bazaaris setin the structure of the book.

According to Mohsin, the novel tried to reject this zero-point binary and the idea of forcing the reader to the uncomfortable position of trying to judge something without knowing the truth.

The session followed the welcome address by Dr Yaqoob Bangash, the organizer of the ThinkFest.